Learn Crochet Now Blog

I wanted to let you all know that the “Learn Crochet Now” video has been released and is available to those future crochet addicts.

I hope to meet you all in the forum and/or the chat room. We will have lots of fun talking crochet, learning new things and making all kinds of fun patterns. What a sense of accomplishment you feel when you finish a project, and even moreso when making things for your friends and family. It’s a good feeling when someone requests you make them something. I know you all will have that feeling of accomplishment when you finish your own projects.

I finished the hat for the poncho. I think it’s a cute set for an 8-10 year old girl. You can scroll down a bit to see the poncho.

Now all my projects are completed except for the scrap yarn afghan that I’m knitting. I will do that until I come up with another project to work on .

I’ve been looking for an afghan hook and have not been able to obtain one as of yet, so I will continue to look so I can start on a pattern that uses a chart for the design. I have the pattern picked out, I just need the afghan hook to get started. I’ll keep you posted.

Happy crocheting!

I’m sure many of you are waiting for the release of the video. I promise, it’s going to be very soon! Just wanted to keep you up to date on the progress.

As for my projects, I needed to use up some of my scrap yarn, so I’m working on cable knit afghan. I have almost 2 strips done…a pink one and a blue one.

I also completed a child’s poncho. It came out really nice. It’s a pretty sherbert color even though the picture looks orange. I’m in the process of making a hat to match.

Happy crocheting!

Well, I put an end to the rose afghan since it just seemed too bulky with all those roses. I had 4 strips sewn together and I am using it for a lapghan, or as my son named it, a shoulderghan…

Right now, I am working on a little girl’s poncho. I finished the front of the poncho last night and will continue working on that today. The poncho is worked with little granny squares. It is really looking quite cute. I will post a picture of it when it’s completed.

I am coming up with more ideas for the chatroom and possible crochet-a-long patterns. I think it’s going to be so much fun doing projects all together.

Please be patient with us on getting this video released. It is taking a little longer than we expected. We are waiting for just one key item, and hopefully we will receive it before too long. Please keep checking back often, or leave your email with us and we’ll notify you as soon as it’s released.

Once we are up and running, as I mentioned before, I’d like to have a chat room for us all to talk crochet, ask questions, and exchange patterns. What I’ve been thinking is perhaps one night a week, we can get together at a set time and do a crochet-a-long. We would pick a project and work on it together as a group. And each week, we’d get together to see how everyone is doing on the project, ask any questions there might be. It would be like a sewing circle getting together to craft and chat. Once you’ve downloaded the video we can talk about that. I’ll see how many of you would be interested in that idea and we can go from there. It would be fun to know others are working on the same project. We could even have a seperate page for those that would like to send in pictures of their project. It would be fun to see how everyone did, what color combinations others used etc. And then once one project is done, everyone can vote on what project they’d like to work on next. Just a few ideas I’m tossing around in my head.

I’m hoping to have the video released this week. I’m very excited! I really wish there were this type of thing out there when I was learning crocheting. It would have made things alot easier for me. I hope everyone that downloads it really enjoys it and starts them on their own crocheting addiction! After doing the crocheting videos, I’m thinking of also doing some knitting videos. I know there alot of people that would like to learn that as well! But that’s down the road. Let’s learn crochet first!

Along with the download, you will also gain access to the chatroom that I will have up! I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and sharing ideas, patterns etc. I think it will be a fun place for us to get together and ask questions, share projects that we are working on or want to work on. I think I’ll call it our “Crochet Circle”! Hope to see you there!

I haven’t done any crocheting the last few days since I was down with a cold and really didn’t have the ambition to do anything, but I NEVER stop thinking about things I want to do. There’s so many things I want to make, but just not enough time to do it all! Once this video is released, I’d like to start working on another one doing granny squares. Granny squares because there is so much you can do with granny squares and it’s easy for beginners to learn, and then feel good when they’ve made a great project with the granny squares. I had a friend come visit from Texas back in October and she wanted to learn to crochet.

I taught her the granny squares and she has been doing them ever since. She has made about 5 granny square afghans for various members of her family. She told me she is totally addicted now. :laugh: She also downloaded this first video to learn to make a washcloth and scarf. Well she sent me a gift, her first ever scarf. She was so proud of it and she really should be, she did an awesome job! As for me, I’m still working on the rose hexagon project. I have many ideas swirling around in my head while I work on the afghan of other original things I can come up with, but one project at a time.

I wanted to say thanks to all the folks that have downloaded the “free trial” of our new instructional crochet video. The free trial period has now ended and we are busy preparing for the offcial release.

We really did not advertise it that heavily and the response was terrific!

We are starting to receive responses back from our survey and the feedback has been excellent!

People are very excited to have access to quality instruction that they can download to their own computer and begin using right away. No waiting for the delivery person and no “shipping and handling” charges!

If you would like to learn crochet, please check back on our home page at www.learn-crochet-now.com so you be one of the first to download this new instuctional video.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about original projects. By that, I mean coming up with an idea for an original crochet project instead of following a pattern created by someone else.

I decided to start playing with an idea I had for an afghan with rose-style flowers on it.

I’ve based the project on hexagons which will be sewn together. Much like a granny sqaure afghan.

These photos show what I have so far. I liked the idea of alternating the colors a bit from section so section as you can see.

I’m not sure how the finished product will come out, but it will be interesting to find out. I will post more pictures here when it is finished, so stay tuned.

Believe me when I tell you that we sympathize with folks who have only a dial-up connection available for access to the Internet. My brother-in-law was able to get high-speed Internet access around 1996 where he lives in Massachusetts and we had to wait until 2002 before our little New Hampshire town was wired for broadband. The wait seemed like an eternity!

Anyway, it appears that a number of folks who are on dial-up have been trying to download the video and not having a whole lot of success unfortunately.

The download page does include a warning about trying to download the video using a dial-up connection, and although we discourage it, people are welcome to try. It will take a very long time, so if you do want to try, you might want to try starting up the download some night just before you go to bed and let it run all night, as long as you don’t mind tying up your phone line all night and you have an “unlimited” access account that will not result in extra chages for staying online so long.

Staying online so long with a large download does not guaranty success however. Anything that goes wrong between the server and your PC can cause the download to abort and then you would have to start all over again. Very frustrating when you have spent 9 hours downloading and the download aborts with only 45 minutes to go. Been there, done that!

On a good-quality, high-speed connection, the download can take as little as 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, there simply is no good, reliable and efficient way to make our video available to dial-up users. We would have to put the video on a videotape, CD or DVD and then ship it out and although that it something we would consider in the future if there is enough interest, we are not able to do that at this time.

We wish we could do more for our dial-up connected friends, but right now there just isn’t a way to do it. Stay tuned to this blog however. If anything changes, we will post it here.

We have been having some technical problems with the website and we want to let everyone know we are sorry. I believe we have them all worked out now.

We believe that the main problem has been caused by aggressive SPAM filters that are in use by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Most ISPs use SPAM filters these days simply because it is necessary and the customers demand it. Some estimates suggest that up to 80% of all e-mail sent is SPAM. I can certainly believe that since I sure get my share of SPAM e-mails offering me millions of dollars or offering to enlarge various body parts that I don’t even have!

Just about everyone hates SPAM and I am no exception. We do NOT send SPAM, we never have and we never will! We send e-mail only to those who have provided us with their e-mail address voluntarily. And if someone does not want to get mail from us, we won’t ever contact them again. Plain and simple.

Getting back to SPAM filters. Much time and thought has been devoted to developing SPAM filters and the SPAMMERS are always trying to stay one step ahead of the latest filter technology. In the process, the SPAM filters are often very aggressive and end up filtering out a lot of mail that is not really SPAM at all.

Our domain (learn-crochet-now.com) is only about two weeks old and has NO history of sending SPAM or anything even close. It appears, however, that some SPAM filters are blocking our messages anyway. Perhaps they don’t like the name of our domain - I really don’t know.

As a result, I think a lot of people who have tried to download our video never got the e-mail message that contained the location of the download page. This probably makes them wonder if our site was set up as a “scam” just to harvest e-mail addresses for SPAM purposes. This is certainly NOT the case!

We have sent e-mail messages from a different domain to all the people who have visited our site and entered their e-mail addresses. The e-mail message contains the location of the download page.

We have also changed the functionality of the website. Instead of having to wait for an e-mail message with the location of the download page, visitors will now be taken directly to the download page as soon as they enter their e-mail address and click “Submit.” That should eliminate the problems for people who are on the other side of these aggressive SPAM filters.

Once again, we are sorry for all the problems and we want to thank you for your interest in our video.

Thanks!