This post is, in large part, a nod to the facebook group Make and Do Crochet Crew. If I understand correctly, the group is owned by a small family group of crochet designers, and named after their brand. So a lot of the group posts are from people making the things the owners designed. It turns out to be a great group for all kinds of crochet-related questions and discussion, and to see ideas from other designers as well. Its main attraction for me is that it’s all crochet — you don’t have a few crochet-related posts lost in an ocean of posts about knitting.

So now to talk about my currently active project. (Hey, if you don’t want to read all this, there is a video:

Not too long ago, I wrote about how I make fantail stitches that don’t start off with chains. I wrote that it was chainless foundation friendly, but mainly I do this because I like to work afghans in stripes. This is what it looks like in a project of mine that’s currently on hold, and what I want it to look like.

A lot of people told me how much they like that particular stipe, so I have a new pattern going (Yes, it is my current project. How did you know?) which is mostly composed of this stitch. I wrote about this pattern with all the confidence a few weeks ago. I’ve been working it in a DK bamboo/cotton blend. At that time, the Work In Progress looked like this:

See why I was feeling good about it? It hasn’t been without its troubles. I’ve written about a couple of them in previous posts, and what I did to solve them.

And now that’s nearly done? Well, here’s how it looked a few days ago.

Not exactly the shape I had in mind. And now, to finally get to the point… I got great feedback on what may have gone wrong, and how to potentially do better next time. From (guess who?) the Crochet Crew! These were super helpful.

Judith Ouverson

… I would speculate that the distortion problem is caused by a) the hook size used (you don’t mention the size) and/or b) the lack of stretch in cotton and bamboo fibers vs acrylic fibers rather than the weight of the yarn. Acrylic not only stretches but it bounces back into line and neither cotton or bamboo will do that.

I did use a larger-than-typical hook, BTW.

Allison Urban

My solution to that would be to double or triple the bamboo blend – The drape of that yarn is your issue and the only way around it would be to make it thicker – Yes it would be a huge yarn eater but you would end up with a heavy floppy lovely afghan with the structure you want

^ This last is my favorite… for next time. Most of the stuff I do eats a lot of yarn anyway.

That’s all for next time. But for now…

For this time? I’m definitely not frogging over 100 rows with over 200 stitches each. That’s crazy talk. So I’ve come up with a work-around that will only take a few extra days, and maybe 2 more skeins of yarn (vs. several weeks, and I don’t even know how many more skeins it would take to completely redo with doubled-up yarn, but definitely more than 2.)

Basically, I’m shoring up the skeleton with slip stitches. It’s not the best, but not the worst, either. It would take a lot of words to explain, so I’m just going to go with a couple photos showing the first 2 rows of added slip stitches.

If you’re curious about exactly what I did and/or why it works, ask! I’d love to hear from you.