My Maggie Weldon’s Quick Beginner Crochet Dishcloth has not been so “quick” for this “beginner”. The pattern says it should look like the photo above. The first attempt I took it apart and started over so many times that my yarn had frayed terribly bad. I ended up starting with fresh yarn so that I could again easily see what stitch was what and not hang my crochet hook countless times. Still,  I was struggling.

Then, Kristi at The Mind to Homestead was so wonderful and whipped out the first few rows in no time at all and took a fabulous in detail step-by-step photo and emailed it to me. I wish I could take photos this good! Or crochet this good! LOL

After Kristi’s help and still a lot of trial and error, this is what my first crocheted dishcloth turned out like. Sadly, I was still impressed with myself. It is supposed to be square. It is square-ish. So, the bottom which is my first several rows are all over the place and a bit irregular. The top half my stitches were much more consistent.

Apparently, I have the really bad habit of pulling my stitches too tight as I progress. For one, this makes it harder and harder as you go to SC into the stitches. It also impacts the overall size, appearance, and shape of the finished project. I had also made some mistakes with my edges and attempted to “cover them up” because I did not want to take this one apart yet again. You can see the right side is pretty squirrely.

So, I bought some different multi-colored yarn that I thought may be a little easier to distinguish my stitches while learning. Then I thought I would search for another simple dishcloth pattern using basically the stitches I had learned already. My thought was to see if there was one I could understand better to perfect my process before adding more complicated stitches to the mix. Well, apparently this pattern is the basic pattern. Every where I searched for simple beginner patterns were essentially this same pattern. I even joined ravelry.com from the suggestion of Debbie at Our Old Homestead. I can tell that ravelry will be a wonderful resource, but still I kept coming back to this same basic pattern. I am very grateful for all of the help and support from our blogging community.

So, I decided to give it another whirl. I started out and I measured constantly and was very pleased with my first 4 or 5 rows. I also believe the multi-colored yarn does truly make it easier to distinguish my stitches. Of course it helps that they are not pulled so dang tight too! Then, I stopped measuring as much, but was doing a better job at keeping my stitches looser. Still, after several rows I noticed it was “shrinking”. My stitches still looked consistent, but it was still not as wide the further I went along. I counted my stitches and I had lost several!

So, I starting taking them out until I got back down to just a few rows. As best I could tell I wasn’t missing (skipping) the last stitch on the row each time. I think I’m doing something wrong with the turn and somehow losing one stitch for every row. I still must research this further as I am unclear of what I’m doing wrong.

Alas, here is my second dishcloth. It is still not very “quick” for me. Overall, I think it looks better but it definitely has a trapezoidal shape rather than a square.

Well, this is taking much longer than I had expected to grasp just a few simple stitches and a “quick” beginner’s dishcloth. I’ll never work up to a scarf, much less an afghan!