I can crochet. I don’t do it often, or do it well, and I don’t call myself a crocheter, because I have never successfully finished crocheting anything. Every so often though, I feel like I need to change things up. so I start a crochet project, usually with plans of making a blanket, and either abandon the attempt, or rip it out and knit something with the yarn instead. The reason I have never finished a crochet project is because I only ever feel like doing it when I don’t feel like doing anything else. This isn’t a reflection on crochet as a craft, mind you, just my particular feelings towards it.
I started this rug last fall when we found out when we were moving into this house, and we had all these great wood floors to protect. I was hitting the tail end of my first trimester, and still feeling pretty pukey. I didn’t want to do anything really, but the idea of crocheting rugs for my new house seemed like an idea I could get behind. I had a lot of single and partial skeins of worsted weight yarn that I had just been carrying around for years, and I couldn’t think of a better way to use it up. I don’t tend to knit with worsted weight yarn very often–and when I do, it’s usually a sweater–not great for all those single skeins I dyed when I was learning how to dye.
After spending last week doing a lot of soap-making and blog related research, I have been a little bit too burnt out to knit–crazy, I know. But I started thinking about this rug again. I abandoned it half-done about the time we moved in when I ran out of undyed yarn. My vision for this rug was to pair the single skeins with undyed yarn all the way through, but I’m not very good at crochet, and have no idea how to calculate how long 2 1/2 skeins of undyed yarn will last. I thought I would get a bit more diameter out of it. And the whole point of an odds and ends project is that you don’t buy yarn for it.
Yesterday, we stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work and on our way out, our car wouldn’t start. Just like that, something that is probably the starter wouldn’t work. After many phone calls, a tow truck and jostling a giant carseat around, and getting our other car that we never drive jumped, because we never drive it and the battery was dead. We didn’t get dinner until 9:30. It was not a fun evening.
In the middle of all that, I kept thinking that I would rather be working on something simple. Double crochet over and over again in the round is just about as easy as stockinette in the round. Probably because I was so exhausted, crocheting sounded more satisfying than knitting. In the haze of my I-hate-cars-why-do-I-live-in-a-place-with-rotten-public-transportation-and-I-can’t-ride-my-bike-everywhere-because-I-have-an-infant haze, I suddenly realized that my hang up on having white throughout the rug was silly. It’s an odds and ends rug. It’s not going to look silly if I change it up halfway through, it’s going to look like an odds and end rug, because that’s what it is. Get over yourself and and finish it if that’s what you want to do.
Now I’m determined to finish this rug, so we can use it in our house. I will finish at least one crochet project. Who knows, maybe one day I will add crochet to my resume.