Knitting vs. crochet

After making fifty zillion things for other people for fun, I am doing a little something for myself, i.e. making as many colorful flowers as possible (or 16, whichever comes first) to create a rainbow flower scarf. I am going to use that gorgeous green yarn I got the other day to make a hat (with another flower on it) to go along with it. Hooray!

I don't draw much of a distinction between knitting and crochet normally -- I just call it all "knitting" if it involves yarn, but there's obviously a huge difference. I just figure out what project I want to do first and then think "Oh, I don't know how to do that" and go ahead and figure out what I need to know. For instance, flowers happen to be crochet items usually. But other things I've wanted to do came with knitting instructions so I learned what I needed to know to make them. If I could only do one though it would probably be crochet. For one thing, look what I needed to knit a hat:

A set of circular needles and a set of double-pointed needles, neither of which I particularly knew how to use. I figured it out and it wasn't hard, but it still gets a bit messy at times. When you have 100 stitches on your needles you have the possibility of dropping all of them. Whereas with crochet...

You just need this. And there's just one loop on it generally, so that's all you are at risk for dropping. And it's small! And it won't poke holes in your purse! But that doesn't mean I don't like knitting...I just never thought about the differences before I have been heavily engrossed in both this month.

Here is the beginning of the monster hat project I began a week or so ago. You can see that at this point I had moved to double pointed needles and was learning how to pick up stitches to add something to it. I did the teeth "wrong" technically, but they look the same as if I had done them "right" and they are just as sturdy. But the directions to pick up stitches just didn't make sense until I had done a few of them...

See, it all worked out in the end! I also had to learn how to do an I-cord. So for this project I learned three major new things as well as a half a dozen new stitches I hadn't used before. So that's how I do things...if I want to do it badly enough I just assume I can do it, and plunge into it.

Below, is a picture of something in a book I desperately want to make for myself -- sorry about the glare from the camera, I didn't have a scanner -- but I really love this color combination and I want to learn to make squares. I guess I'll finish the flowers first!