This, I am so proud and pleased to say, is actually Rose’s yarn project.  When she was little, she loved braiding and finger-knitting, but when we tried knitting-on-needles, she was rather bored with the whole thing, and found it difficult to manage the needles.  I let the matter drop, but one day (when I was making crocheted rag rugs) she got really curious, and wanted to try.  Now that I think about it, crochet is a much smaller leap to make from finger-knitting than knitting-on-needles.

Inspired, she got out one of my crochet hooks and worked on a simple square piece, which was my first crochet project, too, and turned out sort of the way mine did when I was her age – that is to say, not square at all.

But she kept her interest, and asked me if she could get some special yarn for her to work on.  Together we picked out some variegated yarn (I think it’s funner to work with when you are just starting out – it breaks up the monotony, and you try to anticipate how the color patterns will work out).  Together we have designed a simple first big project – a shawl.

I’m really more of a knitter, despite the fact that I learnt crochet first, I have not developed the skill as I have with knitting.  So we are plugging along slowly, trying to figure this out!  I worked out the gauge swatch for her, but had her help with the bothersome math.  There was an initial disaster while we figured out how to join the ends without a twist, but now we’ve really gotten along nicely, I think, for an inch or so.

She picks it up, here and there, to work on.  So this might be a shawl in a year…maybe more, as some projects go….but it is her project, worked in Malabrigo so aptly named “English Rose.”