A Whole New World

I treated myself to (amongst other things) a copy of Debbie Stoller's introduction to crochet book in the hope that it would succeed where others (my mother and the Ladybird book people) have failed.  So the other day I bought my first crochet hook from our LYS and gave it a go.  The early signs have been quite promising.  Here is some of the progress so far

Here we have the book itself and my very first square.  I've just been mixing the different stitches and things so it's nothing exciting

I did a rectangle because I figured that even I have the attention span to focus on 10 stitches and make sure I start and end with 10.  That's what I've been finding a bit tricky so far

A circle. This was employed as a wine coaster on Thursday night at Knittable Pisa!

V stitch. This hasn't come out too well and I didn't do much of it, but you can sort of see some of the V-shapes in the stitches.

The thing that's worrying me a little bit is reading patterns.  I had a look at the patterns that come in the book and it's a completely different language.  I suppose I felt like that when confronted with my first knitting pattern too (a Louisa Harding hat that I still wear to this day).

I'm also slightly confused about the difference between the American and British ways of describing stitches.  When you knit, knit is knit and purl is purl regardless of where you are.  Or at least they have sensible translations like dritto and rovescio in Italian (front and back).  For crochet it seems that, once again, the waters of the Atlantic have divided 2 great nations and the terminology is totally different.  What Americans call a double crochet is totally different in English and vice versa.  It's all rather confusing, but I suppose that once you have worked out which language your pattern is in you just follow the instructions.

I've decided what my first crochet project will be.  There seems to be a very nice looking small clutch bag that you can make of basically just one stitch in 1 piece with some gaps for handles.  Then you just fold it in half and sew the sides up.  I suppose if I was feeling adventurous I could line it as well, but I think I might skip that bit!  We shall see I suppose.  I've got a bit of a knitting queue to get through first before I get to this, but meanwhile I'll keep practising and see how I go!