Slip, stitch and away...

Been working on some 20st swatches of slip stitch crochet. So far I have done F, B, BiF (my fave - looks like stocking stitch sideways!), FB. I need to have a go at some other combinations now, such as 1x1 and moss stitch. It's not as easy as it might sound - the stitches have very little height, and I'm struggling to differentiate one from another. Have a look at David Burchall's blog, "My Yarnified Life", if you are interested in this technique. It's funny - knitting has all the kudos, and most of the media - and yet, when it comes right down to it, it's two stitches, knit and purl. Sure, there are subsets - lace knitting, cables, intarsia etc - but they all share common stitch constructions. Not so with crochet: you have endless ways to modify the base stitches (extended, crossed, sideways, shells and bobbles etc), and there is at least one completely different kind of crochet in tunisian crochet - a kind of halfway house 'twixt crochet and knitting. I say at least one, because there is also crochenit - a little-known technique using double-ended hooks. I've got a book on the way about it. Yes, I guess you could knit double-ended with a DPN and two colours, but what would that get you (apart from the skill of knitting backwards)? The knitting would still look the same.

Been doing a bit of housekeeping re Blogger keywords (labels) and Flickr tags. A lot of these blog posts are e-mailed, and there's no facility for adding tags as there is in Livejournal, so any tagging has to be done after the fact. I usually forget! As for Flickr? I need to print off a standardised list of tags, and stick to them - there's no drop-down choice, so it gets out of hand. I had about seven different ways of identifying knitting done on the Silver Reed, and a similar amount for the Brothers, too.

I was never one for staying organised. The spirit is willing, but the mind forgets.