Crochety = Crochet?

I've been under the weather with some kind of miserable virus for a few days. I've been sucking it up and going in to lab (I need to supervise students, run a fluorescence-activated cell analyzer for data, and be around to help my lab assistant). When I get back home, I eat a little dinner and collapse into bed. It doesn't help that DH won't turn the AC on, with the constant brown-outs (2 years ago a brownout fried the AC compressor; he doesn't want to pay $2500 for a new one this soon and I can't say I blame him). If I knit a few rows of Lime, it's a big deal - I just feel too ennervated and cranky to hold 2 needles right now.

Enter the art of crochet. Now this is a fiber-art I've never quite taken to, not that I don't appreciate it's beauty (I do) or its utility (DH wears crocheted kippot - skullcaps - every single day, as a matter of fact). Nah, I think it's more to do with a) I never saw it around my house (my mother never crocheted), and b) it's a real one-handed thing (I never saw a lefty crochet). Let me expound a bit: I knit like a righty, cast on as a lefty, but as a knitter, I'm engaging both my hands as I knit (YMMV, of course). I use both hands in different ways: the left guides stitches while the right works the needle and tensions the yarn. Crochet is, well, crochet: one hand does all the work while the other sort of holds on for the ride. I could do a single crochet stitch trim, but that's all I was able to master in all these years (and I even have a book on left-handed crocheting).

Yesterday I must have been a little feverish or something because all of a sudden it hit me: How to crochet. I mean, really do it. In my fevered hallucinatory state, I looked up left-handed crochet on the Interwebs and found these tutorials:


This talented lady has more videos up on YouTube; I watched them all, then grabbed some blue worsted weight wool (Baruffa Maratona, if you want to know) and a size H hook (true story: when DH and I were first dating, we stopped in an EJ Korvette's - remember those?- and in a bargain bin were Susan Bates crochet hooks for a quarter each; I bought one in every size they had). Pretty soon I had made this lacy kippah for a doll, bookmark for a really short book, and this Band-Aid cover for a finger. Someone tell me if the biasing of the bookmark is due to the cabled construction of Maratona, please? Or does it block out?

Here's a peek of my crochet skills at work on the edge of the now-completed Lime scarf:

I like it better than tassels or pom-poms for this pattern. Adds just the right bit of panache.

I'm on a roll. Or should I say, I'm hooked. One day I'll use the crochet cotton I have for its intended purpose (instead of heel and toe reinforcement) and make DH's kippot. Indeed, when I showed him what I made out of the blue Maratona, his very words were, "So why don't you make me a real kippah?" Such faith he has in my skills!