Memorizing will help you concentrating on your project

A judicious effort to memorize the abbreviations and its meanings will certainly help you to concentrate more on your project work rather than wasting you precious time in searching for the meanings of such abbreviations.

As you read the instructions, you will be coming across many things narrated between two parentheses. They normally serve the purpose of providing related information and can be utilized to take up any alternate stitches. For example (from Kooler?s book, Encyclopedia of Crochet) if you come across a narration such as

"(sk 4 ch, 5 dc in next chain) across the row",

then this instruction means that you will have to leave 4 chains unworked ? sk here means skip; hence, skip 4 chains. In the 5th chain, you will do 5 double crochets. Skipping 4 chains and doing 5 double crochets is all what you will have to understand the moment you see or read the above narration embraced between two brackets.

Hope you are not confused. If still you struggle to make out a meaningful understanding, be rest assured that this is only a temporary situation that is confronted by all beginners like you.

As a beginner it is quite normal for you to get little perturbed initially, but you can rely on our word of assurance, as we said earlier, that practice makes perfect. And we might even add - practice makes comfortable!

Stop worrying. In any book on crocheting (and the book that you have probably bought now), the first few pages will always be devoted to abbreviations and symbols. And as you buy and read more and more books on crocheting, you will even tend to skip all those first few pages.

Still not convinced? To instill more confidence in you, we would like to give one more assuring point; please read on:

Imagine a situation or probably a live experience where in you might have tried out a new recipe with a certain brand cheese one day, and it might have tasted so good because of the contribution of the cheese?s distinct flavor. Your immediate response will be that you will run to the trash can, rummage through the dumped items, take out the cheese carton to find the brand name for you to go for the same cheese brand next time. Here, you will be registering the name of the cheese brand in your mind and will never refer to the carton again for the name. Got the point!

Well, the same principle applies to crochet also. You can even keep the label of the yarn that you like most. One of your projects might have turned out to be very successful mainly due to your selection of the right kind of yarn. You can make a note of the brand (and size and texture as well) so as to enable you to refer to the note next time you go for shopping for crochet supplies.

There is one terminology by name ?ply? used in many of our day today items used, including the toilet tissues. The same terminology also holds good in yarns. The word ply refers to the number of strands that were spun together to produce a yarn ? the number of strands usually being two, three or four. However, you will not make out the diameter of the yarn depending upon the size, be it larger or smaller.