Yesterday I spent a very enjoyable day hanging out with my 2 best friends. And I got to learn to crochet at the same time! My sister tried to teach me to crochet a couple of years ago – she is amazing at it, having made us this blanket:

The squares look like this close up:

I still have the granny square she taught me to make but this was the sum total of my crocheting career:

I think this might be the same as the squares she made, but I’m not 100% sure – any crochet experts tell me for sure?

Anyway, back to yesterday. We did a course run by Crafty Baba, a group of people based in Suffolk who teach knitting, sewing and crochet. Our teacher was the lovely Cybèle De Jong, who knows one of my friends so it felt really relaxed and friendly, just sitting in her living room eating cake, drinking tea and chatting. Oh, and learning to crochet.

We started off with the basics – a chain, double stitches, triple stitches, then a fancy box thing stitch, and then my personal favourite, the shell stitch. It took me a while to get the hang of how to hold the work and the wool and the hook and stuff (so I kept laughing at myself for being so rubbish!), but I made this:

I think you’ll agree, this is pretty amazing…….or not. But it was just to practise all the stitches and things, so it doesn’t have to look pretty.

My friend Fran, who organised for us to do this course, already knows how to crochet so when we went back to her house for lunch and more tea, she taught us how to do a granny square and I made this:

You can’t really tell here, but I changed wools and everything! (The middle bit is a multicoloured crafting cotton with white in and the outside bit is a plain white cotton).

Then when I got home, I found that my sister had written down the instructions to make the square she taught me, so I made one of those (to make sure I could still remember all the stitches after a whole day!):

I haven’t done the last step, so I think this looks a bit different from the yellow one at the top. My sister gave me the spare wool from the blanket and since all of my cushion covers I made 10 years ago are totally falling apart, I fancy crocheting some granny squares to make cushion covers to match the blanket, which lives on our sofa. I might try to find other simple granny squares so it’s not all too matchy-matchy. I can safely say I’m hooked (I had to – sorry, not sorry) on crochet!