The little surprise presents in the pockets of my give-away Spring aprons were little stripy crocheted Easter eggs. I loved the idea of little colourful crochet eggs to pile up in a basket and last Easter set about locating a pattern.
Not as easy as you might think because although if you Google "Crochet Easter egg pattern" quite a few possibilities come up, they don't all work out exactly as the pics would have you believe, or not in my inexpert hooky hands anyway. Size was an issue - I didn't want to make tiny eggs but neither did I want great big ones; what I was after was something that came out about the size of a large hen's egg. Again not quite as easy to find what I was looking for as I thought it would be.
The first pattern I tried didn't end up looking like an egg at all - more a kind of barrel and it was too big. Not what I was after. Further efforts produced something passably egg-like but too small, or something that was egg-like at one end, but not at the other. No good either.
Anyway, after a certain amount of trial and error, I found a pattern here at Easy Makes Me Happy which I tweaked a bit, more by accident than design, and this is the crochet Easter egg to beat all eggs as far as I am concerned! Last year I made a handful of eggs in plain colours. This year I got adventurous and went stripy! I used a 4mm hook and a cotton DK weight yarn in a variety of colours.
I followed Tara's pattern in terms of numbers of stitches and rows but I crocheted the eggs using half treble crochet (UK terminology) instead of single crochet as per the pattern (US terminology). Sorry, this is mixing my ammunition so to speak! I think what I mean is, in UK terms, half treble crochet instead of what would be, according to the pattern, double crochet and in US terms, half double crochet instead of, according to the pattern, single crochet and I went into the back loops of each stitch only.
I am not sure that my efforts to clarify this have not confused the issue further! What I did was: yarn over, hook into back loop of stitch, yarn over, pull hook through back loop of stitch, yarn over and pull hook though all three loops left on hook.
This gave me the size of egg I wanted and, by going into the back loops only, I got a nice stripy ridged effect in the crochet which I really like. I discovered this by accident last year when my very novice crochet skills were trying to follow the pattern and didn't quite manage it. Then, of course, this year I had the dickens of a job working out what I had done, when following the pattern correctly this year didn't produce the same look as last year's! For the stripy numbers I did two rows of each of three colours. Last year's plain eggs sit nicely now alongside this year's stripy ones (the ones I haven't given away that is!).
Have a go! They aren't at all difficult and are pretty quick to make up. The only thing is that you need to concentrate on the pattern as you go, so they are not easy to do if there are distractions around. A few eggs went well and truly wonky when I tried to answer the phone half way through, for example! And use a stitch marker if, like me, keeping count is not your strong suit!
Happy Hooky-Egg Making!
