Good thing I have two! The older camera has given up the ghost. It is a Sony well made. I suspect the whole aspect of being digital and all the bits that go with being digital, makes for a shorter life span. I guess it just doesn't have the capability to go on for an almost unlimited number of years. I mean, I still have an Olympus Trip 35 purchased roundabout 1978. When I am feeling old fashioned I can load it with 35 mm film and point and shoot and it works... The sony digital is about 5 or maybe 6 years old, I am told that is a good life expectancy for that camera... Progress?
Long Thin Scarf
I am still working on the idea of long thin crochet scarfs. The first one from the pattern link I gave in the previous post is an excellent example of quick and easy -- to create quick and easy is not so easy as one might think. I took a hint from some of my Mile-A-Minute booklets that I have, but did not want to copy straight out of it. I want to create something from my own brain. I am sort of stuck though, I have five rows and am now stuck for a border or an edging.
I went to the second hand store this morning to see if I could find some inspiration there and picked up three older knit and crochet magazines.... There is a border used on a sweater pattern in one magazine that I think might be just the right finishing touch on the current scarf. I will get working on it later today.
Crochet Stitches Dilemna
Another place that I have looked for inspiration is an old instruction book that I have had forever; Mon Tricot Knitting and Crotchet Dictionary a french publication but printed in english.
I have had this book for probably 30 years and until recently never thought too much about the descriptions of stitches! Probably because I don' t refer back to much anymore. It is the european system. I always thought that the American compared to European was fairly simple, dc in american being tc in european. I went to do the stitches according to the description in Mon Tricot, I found that a American/Canadian double crochet was not a triple crochet in European as I had previously thought (or is french crochet different than english?), it is actually a half triple crochet! A triple in Euro, is another loop yet!
Then, of course something simple like YO is not what it is called in the Mon Tricot book that I have, it is WRH meaning wrap round hook... The book also has no single crochet stitch it is called a double... I have concluded that this book is very difficult to use if I read the instructions. If I look at the picture of a pattern I can fairly easily figure out the American/Canadian version of what it describes...
And still on the subject of differences -- using the diagram system for following a crochet pattern, which seems to becoming more and more popular, the stitch symbols used are also different.
The American/Canadian symbol for a single crochet is a short up right stroke with a cross piece half way, and as I said there is no sc in the euro system, or maybe it is a dc, which is symbolized as a single upright stroke.
So then the Am/Can double crochet has the same symbol as the Euro treble crochet, but as I said, a double crochet doesn't actually translate to be a treble, but a half treble, for which the symbol resembles a capital "T"-- then there is the double treble in euro but what do you think that might be in Am/Can?? Well at least the chain stitch is the same in both systems of crochet - a oval on its side...
Does any of this make any sense, to you? Me Neither! I guess my gramma taught me the stitches and didn't really name them for me, so when I finally figured out what stitches were called I was following the Am/
Can language and not the Euro language of crochet. It really makes the translations difficult as I said earlier, but for some strange reason after more than thirty years (maybe closer to 50 years?) of this old Mon Tricot Stitch Dictionary being in my possession, I am not ready to give it up, just yet. It has some interesting pattern stitches that I have yet to tackle...
Give me a few more days to figure out a finishing round to my own long scarf...
