My son's holey gloves got the Mario treatment...crochet style

My son loves his gloves, 

to the point where they now have large holes in them.

When I promised to fix them I was thinking

of simply crocheting a brown rectangle as a patch.

Then I realized that I could be more creative so

this is what I did.




He's had his gloves for years

and he is the type of kid 

who would rather get something fixed

than buy something new.

(Takes after his mum :D)  

He still really likes Mario so

he was really happy with them.

Also in this picture is my beagle

who was sick all day today and part

of yesterday.

I was so happy to see her sniffing around,
hopefully she

will be eating again soon.

Crocheting backwards without tripping

I've made a bit more progress on my gloves.
The colour pattern on the decreases isn't perfect
but since they will be worn
by an imperfect person (me, me, me)
 I'm happy.

I've reached the wrist stage which means

I'll no longer be working in the round,

I'll now be working in rows back and forth.

This means that I will need to use 

another technique that's new to me:

backwards crochet.

The little piece at the bottom is my

practice piece.

Athough they sound similar 

backward crochet is not the same as reverse crochet.

Reverse crochet or crabstitch is worked

with the right side facing you and results

in a twisted stitch.

Backward crochet is a little harder to explain.

Basically this technique 

makes sure that the wrist (worked in rows)

will look like the rest of the glove (worked in rounds).

edit:
I forgot to distinguish which rows were made by which technique.
The glove itself was made with jacquard,
which is a colorwork technique where you
work the different colours and carry the
unused colour along the wrong side (in strands).

I used both jacquard and backwards crochet
in the red sample.
The jacquard is the green and red rows
worked on the right sides.
This is alternated with straight red rows
that are worked in backward crochet
on the wrong sides.

Tackling jacquard crochet

It's halfway through January and I thought

by now I'd have done a lot of yarn work.

But I do have a good excuse why that didn't happen.

My oldest son has been home for the holidays,

and I drop everything anytime I've got my whole family together.

Things have now returned to normal so

I've picked up my hook again 

and tackled a project that I've had on hold.

since 2009 (2 years!!)

This pattern is made mainly using a technique
called jacquard crochet.
It's basically a technique that works with
strands of colours hooked into the back loop.

When I first tried it I was having a lot of difficulty
with the tension since jacquard crochet

is much tighter and less stretchy than regular crochet.
I'm a tight crocheter as it is so
that didn't help.

I also found all the new techniques

a little overwhelming so I

put it aside until I felt more confident.

 I've decided to start completely over again.

Here is a picture of how far I've gotten.

I'd love to say that the stitches are quickly sliding off my hook,

I won't even tell you 

how many hours I've spent on this so far,

but what's different now is that it's a bit 

easier and I now see it as doable.

Some things I'm still struggling with

and I'll post more specifics 

about them in a later post in case 

you want to give this a go yourself.

Happy 2011