The Horror of being a leftie in a right-handed world

The other day as I was shopping for more yarn, I made an impulse buy at checkout and bought Crochet Today! "Special Issue." I haven't been crocheting for awhile and thought I should get back to my roots. I only starting knitting three years ago, but I've been crocheting since I was twelve and this mag seemed to have a lot of small projects that can be completed within a day.

Flipping through the pages, I came across the "Berry Beret" pattern and thought, that would look like a mighty addition to my wardrobe. The pattern was both written out and diagrammed which, I am forever grateful - at least I am grateful, now.

You see, I am left-handed. And for the longest time, I did not realize that I read and crocheted all my projects backwards. When you are making scarves and blankets, you don't notice this small, but important, detail. For the most part, scarves and blankets look the same forwards and backwards, right facing and wrong facing. And, for the most part, lefties can get away with doing things backwards once they realize that they are working all the patterns this way.

Well, I forgot that fact while working on this beret. So what I thought would be a walk in the park, turned out to be an exercise in patience. Try as I might, my ending rounds never matched up to the diagram (I ceased trying to figure out how to read the written directions). I must have frogged the same round 5x trying to work out the problem when it dawned on me in the late afternoon — duh, I'm lefted-handed! When I crochet in the round, my work travels clockwise. Righties crochet counter-clockwise and that's how the diagram was presented. After that, it was smooth sailing.

I am now creating a custom-made amigarumi for a friend of mine and am now wondering if I've been making all these little creatures WS out, but that's a thought for another day...

roseofmay

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