Knitty Gritty & Crocheting

I have a new FO*. It is a Coffee Cup Cuddly thing. I'll post a picture soon. I made it for my mom's girlfriend Pat's birthday (along with a starbucks gift card and some sort of stamp collector thingy). More details below.

Knitty Gritty is a show on DIY that stars Vickie Howell, someone Sooner does not like but that I am drawn to because she has red hair that flips like mine. She begins each episode by introducing her "knitsters", a group of changing people who knit while the project is being explained. There is one episode where she gives googly eyes to one of them (a girl musician on the guitar strap episode). Anyway, then they go into the project, showing techniques blah blah blah using a knitty cam where it zooms in on their hands from above so you can see how they make marvelous things happen. There are also various knit bits that are sometimes magical (bamboo and soy can make yarn!) or sometimes useless (let's watch vickie put a ball of yarn in a tupperware container and cut a hole in the top!). The show overall is lameish, but there are always diamonds in the rough. I learn one quality thing during every episode.

Anyway, the pattern for the coffee cup holder calls for a single crochet border. As Sooner and I consider crochet an inferior fiber art (TM), but have recently begun to be swayed the other way, I haven't yet learned how to do a single crochet blah blah thingy. So I tried using the "chrocheting for knitters" guide in Stitch N Bitch. The illustrations and explanations didn't really help for using crochet to border something previously woven.

I was going to call Dewey in as a last resort and save my project until after my next trip to Philadelphia (where Dewey the crochetrix lives) or after my next trip to Flying Fingers Yarn Shoppe. However, there was an explanation in one of the episodes of Knitty Gritty that I had cached on my DVR. And I was completely saved. In the guitar strap episode Vickie totally uses the knitty cam to do a single crochet border. I watched it, rewinding a couple of times, and came away a crocheter. Amazing.

The coffee cup holder was my first episode with DPNs** and it was mega weird. I will probably try to do all circular projects on circular needles where possible. I also did some striping and fair isle on it, so that might be where it got sort of funny. I also had to do some major math, as I used worsted weight yarn and bigger needles (by the way, on size 5 needles with ww yarn I suggest casting on 40 stitches and doing a couple less rounds).

I hope Pat likes it!

*Finished Object
**Double Pointed Needles (method of knitting using three needles in a round so that you make a tube)