Crochet issues

[velvetpage]

Okay, this post is specifically for those of you on my list who have done crochet or knitting before.

I finished the first square of my baby afghan, and something is bothering me. I did two rounds of single crochet around the edge to finish it off, and what I've found is that it's not square. It looks like the tension is off significantly on all sides, but most seriously on the top. It's got a slightly rippled look to it around the edges, and that's bad.

I switched from my afghan hook, which I'm pretty sure is a 4.00 mm G hook, to a regular hook of the same size. Should I rip it out and go down to a 3.5 mm? Is the problem with the edging, or with the square itself, or with both? For the moment, I've left it with a loose loop, so I can tear it out without much trouble, but I want the advice of those of you who have worked with gauge issues before.

Meanwhile, I started the blue-and-yellow square. The yarn itself is driving me crazy. It took me ten minutes just to find the end of the strand, and I had to pull half the middle out to do that. Now the yellow yarn in particular is tangled up with itself. This'll teach me to buy bargain-basement one-pound balls of yarn. It'll take me half the square to use that stuff up, and keeping it out of Elizabeth's hands in the meantime will be a treat. Would it be so hard for the yarn company to set their winder so the yarn end doesn't disappear inside the ball when cut?

That is the closest I'm going to come to a rant today.

I need to go put in another load of laundry, and fold the baby laundry that's in the dryer. And I'm still putting off those piles of marking. I wonder how guilty I'll feel if I don't get to any of it? Answer: probably not very.

Comments

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

Hmm, is the tension visibly different in the stitches itself? It's possible that if you started off loose and started to tighten up (or vice versa) you'd get a lot of wobble eventually. A hook that's too large could do this, as I find it's pretty easy to give the loop a little extra tug after it comes off the hook, and makes it a smaller gauge than I intended (of course, it might just be a fault of my particular hooking style).
Pulling the whole thing out would certainly be aggravating! Perhaps it's only that bit at the top that is off? If so, maybe you can go back and redo it with an altered tension.
That's about as coherent as I think I can manage today. Back to rest, fluids, and la-la land! :)
P.S. the crochet work for the ring-bearer pillow is now done. There's embroidery, sewing, and possibly beadwork left to do, but that should finish it! Ian was seeing Elizabeth carrying it up with her, but I warned him that it might be a little too much. Maybe we can tuck the pillow in her flower basket :D When I was a flower girl (and also very little) I had a bouquet in a basket, as that was the most foolproof, and least messy. Once the pillow is done (and I quit hacking up a lung), that's my next project!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if I could correct it by switching to a smaller hook size just for the edging. I'm worried that the tension might be off a bit at the end of each row of the square itself, though. That way, it would look pretty even through the middle but still wind up wonky for the edging. That's the only thing I can think of that I wouldn't have noticed as I was going along. The middle is flat - it's just the sides that are off.

I'll leave it until you can look at it on Friday. We'll come up with something. And I know I have an E hook around here somewhere.

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

i've found that you can fudge the edging on an uneven block by making the edging stitches a little looser in the dips and a little tighter on the hills. It depends totally on what you're working on, so If I'm not half-dead my Friday, I'll be able to see it in person! It was looking pretty even when I saw it in progress last Friday.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Not knowing how afghan and single crochet would mesh with each other, I'm probably not going to be much help here... Have you tried this combination of techniques before?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Yep, the plaid afghan used exactly the same look and it turned out fine.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Well, if you were using the same crochet hooks for each technique (or equivalent thereof) then I agree with sassy_fae, it's probably something to do with the tension... Though that's just a guess. :) Can't think of any other reason why it wouldn't work, if you're using the same weight of yarn for both the afghan stitch and the regular crochet.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. I'm going to try taking it out and reducing a few stitches evenly along each side to see if that works. If it doesn't give me enough improvement, I'll switch to a smaller hook.