Hooks, Books & Me

Hello yarnians (made up from Narnians hehe😉), hope you are doing good in your patch of crochetland.   We are having downpour here in Mumbai, after a week long dry spell. Our lives in India, very much depend on the monsoon (as does everyone's..) because the rains not only offer respite from sweltering summer but also help farmers earn their bread who are dependent on the rains for income (more than 60% of the farmers lack irrigation facilities in India making them rain dependent) and it replenishes the country’s water reservoirs as well. So in a nutshell, monsoon means happiness. The weather is nice cool and windy which is perfect time to crochet. Sometimes you can’t just have enough of some things in your life and what you create impacts you in a greater way. I feel, creativity is very subjective; you just have to keep experimenting with newer ideas, keep trying various methods. And that’s what I do or I try to do in my day-to-day life. It's not always easy to manage ...

Tapioca Fritters - A vegan and gluten-free dish Did I tell you that I like to cook as well.. Yes, apart from daily cooking I do enjoy cooking as a hobby. My favorite hobbies are reading, cooking and of course crochet (arranged chronologically by the time I picked up those hobbies..!!)..  Books were introduced to me by my father when I was very young and could read on my own, he used to buy me “Chandoba”, a classic Indian monthly magazine for children. It used to have all sorts of mythological and mystical stories that ran for years and I used to wait for the issue eagerly. Good old days..!! But that was the beginning and I never looked   back since then, I grab every opportunity I find to read (now a days I get very less opportunities though.. sigh..!). So little time and so many things to do, but this is for some other day to discuss.!! So coming back to cooking, cooking was introduced to me by my maternal aunt, I used to fondly call her “Aatu”, she tau...

As we have discussed in our earlier posts, basically, there are two types of yarn (decided arbitrarily though..!!) that we crochet with. Regular yarn (any fiber) and thread yarn ( mostly cotton ). Thread   is particularly used to make doilies, table runners and other intricate home décor items. Many crocheters are hesitant to work with thinner yarn such as thread, mostly because, many of them find it too fiddly to work with and also because you have to use hooks of much smaller size (0.3 mm to 1.75 mm) which are slightly different (in terms of length ) than regular yarn hooks. I prefer to work with what is known as “Steel Crochet Hooks”, these hooks are specifically designed to work with threads. But in fact, it is fun to work with cotton crochet thread and steel hook; it’s like an acquired taste you may say..!! The more you crochet with thread, the more you will love to work with it. Crochet thread comes in many sizes from size 3 to size 100 (diameter is i...