Tunisian or Cro-hooking

I have decided that I want a baby afghan for the upcoming new one, oh did I say another grand was on the way, well it is.

I could loom one, and I will but I do love the look of some of the newer stitches in Tunisian crochet and cro-hooking. So I have been playing a bit with them. I started with a playing with a stitch that I got from a video by Kim doing a Tunisian simple stitch with a twisted knit stitch, but I didn't like it much. At least not for a baby ghan. It just didn't hit that special spot. So then I played with a few more Tunisian stitches and decided to switch to cro-hooking. After all the hook I grabbed is a moez cro-hook that was just hanging around (I do love the moez hooks).

So I jumped over to a tutorial at annies attic for a "crochenit" stitch called the fan stitch. Wow what a mistake. I kept loosing stitches and couldn't figure out why. Something must be wrong with the tutorial as it has you decreasing by six and increasing by five. Just doesn't work.

So I went on to play with a few more stitches and none seemed to be what I wanted. Somewhere, cannot remember where, I had found a stitch that is much like the fan stitch but uses fewer stitches in the shell. So I choose to use a three stitch shell, and a high stitch row to go along with the shell row. I play a bit to see how this would look, with some dark green and light purple yarn (I know not a good combo, but for practice you sure can see whats happening).

After playing a bit I decided that a straight high stitch row wasn't going to do the job I needed, but remembered that on the fan stitch they dropped to the lower row and picked up a stitch there. This is somewhat like doing a raised double crochet. The difference is that you are picking up a loop in the horizontal stitch below and then doing a couple of chains to bring it to height.

So now I have it. I started with a long tail cast on in homespun in a pink color, then changed to a blue for the reverse side color. Now I am doing the pick up row in the high stitch with that drop to the row below, this is centered in between shell stitches. Then the return row is a three chain three shell stitch pattern.

Guess what? I like it. This is so fluffy and will be a beautiful piece when it is done. Sorry I just started this this afternoon. I figured that I had time since I had to sit at the doc's office for a couple of hours. See my son got very sick yesterday and today he was wheezing and gasping for air. Doc says he has pneumonia. Isn't that nice the day after his birthday he gets really really sick.