Sepp the Seahorse

 

I had some quiet time yesterday afternoon and I got a few more inches worked on Sepp the Seahorse.  Crochet involves more counting than knitting, and while I can usually figure out where I've gone wrong on blanket squares, when I'm making a creature, I tend to get confused.  Staying on top of my counting is the only way I stay reasonably sane, and that means no TV and it helps if the house is quiet.  On this project, the tail is shaped by the stitches (the stitches on the outside of the curl are taller than those on the inside), so that kind of helps when I need to figure out where I am, but if my end-of-round marker falls out, it's very scary.  The problem is that on Sepp (and most other amigurumi type of creatures), you don't work in rounds, you work in a single, giant spiral.  It's a lot like knitting in the round that way, except you can't use your double pointed needles to figure out where the rounds begin and end.  I usually hook a locking stitch marker through the last stitch of the round, but locking and unlocking it takes a lot of time, so I just loop it through the stitch and leave it unlocked.  This means I sometimes knock it out and then chaos ensues.

If there's an easier way to deal with this, the keeping up with where you are in crochet, I'd love to hear about it.  Maybe crocheters just figure out how to read their work better than I can at this point.  I'm working on it though.  If I keep dropping my marker, I'm going to get pretty good at it!