Monday Ramble

My Christmas ornament beading has temporarily come to a halt. Due to problems with hand-eye coordination, depth perception and other frustrations, I put the beadwork aside for a day or so.

I decided to try a little crochet instead. I found a beautiful pattern and a small scrap of sport weight yarn and attempted to make a swatch of the pattern.

I ran into a few problems. The first one: I haven't crocheted in so long I'm not able to hold the thread properly to maintain steady tension, so my stitches aren't even. With practice, I'm getting better and holding the work is becoming more natural. The second problem is: although I've been crocheting for 70 years and reading word patterns since I learned to read, I've never crocheted from a computer generated diagram. The pattern didn't come with a symbol legend and some of the symbols were unclear to me.

I went so far as to download a free crochet stitch program in order to find and decipher the symbols. I'm not too old to learn. No, I'll probably never make crochet patterns with it, but it was a great help.

I discovered that although bead weaving and crochet are both needlework, they each require different hand muscles, different ways to hold the project and a different approach to deciphering the pattern.  I feel that I need to go back to some of the handwork I grew up doing in order to keep my brain, and consequently my hand-eye coordination from deteriorating any further.

Now it's time to get back to the Christmas ornaments. Second angel is in the works. One more angel, three drums and one snowflake to go.