A Measure of Blues

So, that pretty cruise blue bamboo hairpin lace project pictured in yesterday's post?  All gone baby.

I got it off the loom and worked one whole side of the loops crocheting together bunches of four and got a quarter of the way up the second side when I realized two things:  the apparent mess was not apparent, it was not going to smooth out and tighten up and look like this once both sides were finished; and I had half a layer of thread on the tube--not enough to finish the side.

I think what happened was that I missestimated the width between the poles on the loom and set them half an inch too wide which made the loops too big to be filled by the called for eight stitches so the whole thing looked loose and sloppy.

I considered taking out the double crochet and going back over the loops with fewer and smaller stitches purposely making a lacier look but two things bothered me about that: I didn't have a pattern for a different stitch and I'm too new at this to improvise; and I was daunted by the thought of sorting out those loops again once I'd removed the stitches.  

After discussing it with Ed I was inclined to agree with his observation that I could probably remake the loops faster than I could sort them out.  Picture 3/4 inch loops sticking out of every stitch on both sides of a strip of single crochet and that's about what you have when you remove the strips from the loom.  It resembles a pole dancer's boa.

So when I returned to my workstation (urm bed) I took one more brief look at the mess and then picked up the nearly empty cardboard tube and started winding the thread off the strip back onto the tube while watching a video taking care not to watch what I was doing so I wouldn't feel too sad.

Hours and hours and hours of work down the tubes  Or rather, back on the tube while my eyes were glued to the boob tube.  Chalk it up to learning I guess.

Speaking of learning: I'm ready to admit that the learning curve for hairpin lace is too steep for me to expect to get proficient enough quick enough to do any of the larger sized projects I had in mind for Xmas and Bday gifts in the next couple of months.  If only I could have bought the loom and started practicing when I first started drooling over the images of hairpin lace on the crochet sites and blogs.  Want to see what I saw?  Try this: Google images: hairpin lace