Eggs Again and Latest Crochet

The eggs have been in use all week and I am quite pleased with how they were received. They have mainly been used in the home corner for cooking, and within that there has been some counting, sorting by colour and lots of talk about eggs. 

The eggs being over, the next thing I have been doing is the swatches from my Kindle crochet book. As I showed earlier I started with texture patterns. As I looked through the book I found the lace patterns. I started with some simple ones, and, as usual, followed the written pattern. Although I understand the idea of the visual pattern I had never been able to follow it. I didn't take the time to understand the symbols and thought I preferred the written version. In the written patterns there are often little parts in brackets that describe one combination of stitches you do within another stitch. Add to this the asterisked parts that you repeat and take a pattern with many rows in its repeat, then each row begins to become very long winded. This then makes it hard to see where you are, and on a kindle I can't quickly draw a line to remind me. I got to one row on the pineapple pattern I was trying and got totally confused, so decided to look at the visual pattern to help. It was only then I began to see the beauty of the visual pattern. After a short time I was just using that, and 'reading' it in the way I imagine you read music-almost instantaneous looking and doing. I know this may have been a bit of a lengthy description of something maybe most people find easy and obvious but I was so pleased that I finally understood it. The fact that you see before you what is appearing in yarn just makes so much sense. I am also pleased that I am making progress in my understanding of crochet, as it has never happened with knitting! I will show the swatches I have made soon. I blocked the lace pattern ones last night. I blocked them quite 'aggressively' ( a hilarious use of the word aggressive I felt in my crochet magazine!), that is I stretched them quite a bit. I will unpin them later as they are dry now. I hope your week has been progressing well. Work has been exhausting this week and I cannot wait until the end of tomorrow! Egg hunt and biscuit decorating party to do first though!