New stitches: C2C crochet

My Google game is weak.   I read six or seven blog posts about “C2C” crochet before bothering to look up what it meant.

In my defense, I’m still without internet at home. But this weekend it finally happened – I discovered what C2C means (corner to corner) and even read up on how to do it. And then saved it to my laptop so I could follow it when I got home, and not end up with another pic-not situation.

For the yarn: I had started to make a scarf with one of my Caron Cakes, but I was feeling entirely uninspired by it. A whole 200g of yarn in straight rows of single crochet? I don’t think so! So I frogged it and started my very first C2C attempt.

Now, I’m going to give you a very important pointer that would have saved me about an hour, and five re-starts if I had known it:

The first square in a new row might come out at this angle

But no, you’re not building the item by connecting squares at the corner like that. You need to pivot that square so it’s lying next to the existing square, like this

If this is really obvious to you and I’m just special, then carry on and we’ll pretend it never happened. But just on the off chance that someone out there thinks the same way I do (you poor thing!) I hope this helps when you try C2C for the first time.

So I eventually figured it out and got going, aiming for a square blanket.

But at the exact point that photo was taken, I realised I wanted a scarf, not a blanket. Of course I’m not going to go for the standard square when making my very first C2C goodie!

So I frogged it some more (but thankfully didn’t have to go all the way back to the beginning) and started making it more rectangular.

It’s actually not that difficult making rectangles rather than squares. Just make sure you actually stop when you get to the end of a row rather than carrying blithely on and having to undo a square after every single row. Y’know, just a hypothetical situation.

After just one weekend I had almost finished my scarf.

And this is my finished beauty

Here’s my thoughts on C2C

Pros

• It has that gorgeous ‘woven’ pattern from the alternating direction of the stitches.
• It makes up pretty quick once you get into the rhythm.
• It’s only chains, slip stitches and double crochet so a lot simpler than it looks.
• There are these wee spaces between the squares, which are giving me all kinds of ideas about buttons and ribbons. Watch this space.

Cons

• This technique eats yarn. I got halfway through and had to frog it again (almost back to the beginning. Sigh) to make it thinner, so it would actually be long enough to class as a scarf and not just an oversized table mat.
• Somewhat related, you have to be absolutely sure how wide you want your object to be. By the time you realise it needs to be thinner/wider you might have a bajillion rows to undo so you can alter it.
• It’s the same block of stitches repeated forever more. Kinda boring after a while.

 

Overall I absolutely love C2C, but wouldn’t want to make a king-sized afghan from it. I’ll definitely be making more, small-ish C2C goodies for the shop at some point in the future.

Anyone else tried C2C? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Hannah

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