What I’ve been up to lately

Haven’t posted in a long time, but I’ve been really busy with work and crocheting.  Here is the tunisian afghan I’ve been working on for quite some time:

Here are some intriguing older hooks I found on Ebay; it is called Hook-A-Loop. Two of these double ended crochet hooks have a needle eye on one end instead of the other hook end.

I have been in email contact with a company called KnitPro, the overseas manufacturer of Knitpicks.com’s Harmony interchangeable knitting needle set. I asked them if it was possible for them to make an interchangeable crochet hook set like the metal Options knitting needle set Knitpicks also sells here in the US. They asked for my address so they could send me “samples” of their wooden crochet hooks, and ended up Fedex’ing to me at no cost to me, an entire set of these (the two larger hook tips are shown below). They screw right onto Knitpicks’ cables (of various lengths, which come with both the wooden Harmony and metal options set):

They also included their double ended crochet hooks:

I also send a jpg to Todd Paschall (http://www.crochetbynumbers.com) and he sent me two pdfs worth of a crochet pattern based on the jpg. You can view some of his free test patterns on his site to see why his patterns are so unique; he has developed a computer program that takes a jpg and generates a unique pattern using columns and rows of numbers. Single crochet is the only stitch used, the rows and columns of numbers tell you how many stitches of each color you put on each row. I need to work up one of his free sample patterns before tackling the huge pattern I bought from him. I will post pics once I have the sample pattern and will eventually post pics of my finished pattern, which I can’t disclose what it is here because the recipient, whom I intend to surprise in a big way with, might be reading here.