When I first learned to crochet, I lived in Bella Vista, California.

At the time, the population of the metropolis I called home was approximately 900 people. There was a post office, a grocery store (that sold, among other things, live bait), a school, and a church.

The limited services available near my home meant that I often drove into the City of Redding when I wanted to go to a bookstore or use the local library, and while the library’s selection of crochet titles was not what could be described as munificent, there was one crochet book that graced the shelves of the public library that stood out from all the others: James Walters’ Crochet Workshop.

The book was excellent and (to my horror) out-of-print. Desperately wanting a copy of my own, I scoured used bookstores to no avail.

Fortunately for me, the internet has changed all that, and several years ago, I acquired my own copy of this wonderful compendium of crochet knowledge:

At the time I first read through this book, I did not know enough to be able to do the 9-round beginner’s project detailed on pages 72 and 73. Today, however, I needed something to work on during my son’s trumpet lesson, and the beginner’s project seemed to me the perfect thing to while away three-quarters of an hour.

Because the purpose of this project is to learn as much as possible about crochet stitches, I needed a light colored yarn to best see the stitches and settled on using the workhorse of neutral yarns: off-white.

After looking over the options in the stash acquisition I had purchased from the same trumpet teacher we were about to see, I settled on this acrylic yarn in the color known as “winter white”:

Using my 4.5 Etimo hook, I followed the directions.

My efforts were not without error, and twice I had to frog an entire round to get to reach my mistake:

But part of the charm and joy of crochet is that unlike many things, when correction is necessary, it is easy unravel to the source of the trouble, correct the mistake, and once again move forward.