My poor husband.

We were at the thrift store today to pick up a bag of towels for birth supplies (my reasoning is that I won't mind throwing away stuff I got at the thrift store if they don't come adequately clean in the wash, but that's another topic totally), & it was cheap enough that we could, with what we had on hand, get some of the yarn I was poring over.

Rob said he thought it might be neat to take up lacemaking. By which he meant thread crochet, of course. Well, I jumped on that since I've been bugging him to learn how to crochet, so we got him some thread and me some yarn and came home.

I threw the Encyclopedia of Crochet at him when we came home, thinking that would be helpful, as it's got basic crochet techniques. He can already do a chain stitch. Or he could, once upon a time. I saw him do it; he did it rather well. He's doing some funky thing with twisting the hell out of the hook to try to get it to go through the chain that already exists.

I'm trying to help. It isn't working. He's right handed. I even tried crocheting right handed just so I could show him better what to do, but I'm awful, just awful right handed. I pointed him towards StitchGuide, which site I know has taught at least one person how to crochet. But it's not working for him. Poor guy. If he makes it through the weekend trying (he's now moved up to attempting to work single crochets into the chain, and I don't know what the hell he's doing wrong; I think he's twisting the chain), he'll probably get the hang of it. But it wouldn't surprise me to find him back at the chainmail soon. Chainmail-making is a nice masculine craft, it seems. Lacemaking not so much so.

At least I convinced him to use worsted weight yarn to start out with, but for some ungodly reason he's insisting on using an F hook with it. I cannot impart the idea that, when learning to crochet, smaller is not necessarily better. He's making it harder on himself than it should be, methinks, but I can't get him to loosen up.