What's on my hook: My first Tunisian stitch cowl

I fell in love with Tunisian crochet (aka the afghan stitch) as soon as I realized just how incredibly easy it is if you already know how to do traditional crochet. Seriously, if you can do a single or double crochet stitch, you can do Tunisian. And there's a whole new world of stitches and terminology that go along with it! I can't wait to learn more.

Tunisian looks a lot like knitting but with the familiarity of crochet. To me, it's almost like a hybrid of the two. The only thing different than regular crochet, is you are using a much longer hook, like 10 inches or more in order to hold all your loops on.

Basically you're working in forward pass rows, where you yarn over and pick up a loop for each stitch over and over until you get to the end of the row...kind of like casting on in knitting. So you will have a bunch of loops on your hook. Then the return pass is where you yarn over and pull through two over and over again until the end, working the stitches off your hook. That's it! You're never turning your work (which is why the work curls so much).

A few things I quickly learned while playing around with this stitch:

1. Your work will curl horribly! It's best to use a larger hook than what the yarn is calling for, and with a looser tension.
1a. So for this pattern, I chained one after yarning over on the forward pass row to make it looser. The curl significantly decreased doing this, but adding the ch1 makes this cowl not have the traditional "look" of the Tunisian stitch.
2. Blocking is your friend.
3. You will be able to make pieces that look knit.
4. My stripes ended up taking on a natural diagonal shape. I think this is normal.

I can't remember the name of the yarn I used but it was a color changing yarn that had different thicknesses throughout. I originally was going to make a cowl with this yarn using traditional crochet, but didn't end up liking the way it looked so I frogged it, but with Tunisian, the stitches really emphasized the gradual color changes nicely.

Top knot with duck face, like a blogger!!