Ufff… I am so glad it is finally holiday time! Which means loads of time to crochet and plenty of food, love it 🙂 As I mentioned in my last post I have been very busy at work and since I am still working on my next tunisian crochet next tutorial I thought I could write a review in the meantime.

Ever since I discovered Craftsy I have been loving online classes and have also been downloading a few videos from Interweave Crochet which teach you specific techniques. It is so relaxing to watch them in the evenings at the hotel when I am away for work and I have finished a couple of them so I thought I should share my thoughts here.

In this post I will review an Interweave Crochet video download called “Tunisian Crochet with Dora Ohrenstein”. I bought this on a sale for US$5, the normal price is US$19.99 so it was quite a bargain. I first heard of Dora because I enrolled in her tunisian crochet Craftsy class, and if you follow my blog you know I loved it. Dora is a great teacher, she explained everything very well and I really liked her. She even answered one of my questions in the forum and was very helpful. Even though I am still working on the pattern from that class (definitely on my list to finish before next year) this has nothing to do with her skills as a teacher and more to do with me working on too many projects at once. Anyway, since I loved her class I decided to download this video and see if I could get a bit more knowledge about tunisian crochet and learn a few more techniques.

The video lasts two hours and it starts with the basic tunisian stitches to then move on to more complicated techniques. She talks about lace stitches, textured fabrics, tunisian in the round, entrelac and others. I think what I enjoyed the most about the video was that it shows you the scope of different fabrics you can get with tunisian crochet and the amazing textures you can get. It gives an overview of what you can achieve with this technique much beyond the basic stitches.

Now, if you want to not only see but learn how to do all these different stitches and techniques then this video is not the one for you. She goes through the basic stitches very quickly, she just does one row of 8 stitches for each of them (simple stitch, knit stitch and purl stitch) and then moves on to more complicated ones. The problem is that she doesn’t go through all the stitches she shows, and the ones she does explain are not in detail or from start to finish. She would have started a sample with the stitch and do one or two rows to show you how to work the stitch but no more than that. You wouldn’t know how to begin a sample with that stitch or how to end it, and there is no document with the class where the stitches are explained in detail. I think that she tried to fit in too many things in the class and that meant she couldn’t go into much detail for any of them. I would prefer to learn something from start to finish rather than know a little bit about a lot of stitches.

One thing I did find very useful is that she explained a few different ways of increasing and decreasing stitches and the pros and cons of each, I already knew most of them but I did learn a few things and it was good to see all the different ways explained in one place. She also had good tips about how to convert knit patterns to tunisian crochet and avoid disappointment and I also liked the explanation of how to do a tunisian cable which I hadn’t seen before. The video comes with a pattern for a vest that I didn’t particularly like, though I did like the stitch pattern.

One last thing to note is that Dora Ohrenstein also wrote a book about tunisian crochet with different stitches and patterns, and this class seems to be a good tool if you have the book, since quite a few of the stitch patterns can be found in detail there so the video gives you a visual aid. I have the book and will write a review on another post, I will only say that if you had to choose between the video and the book I would definitely go for the book!

All in all, I enjoyed this class, I really like Dora as a teacher and I learned a few things I hadn’t seen before but I think she tried to cover too much in two hours and that meant that even though you see all the beautiful things you can do with tunisian crochet you won’t find all the information you need to learn them in this video, and it will be harder if you are only starting with tunisian crochet.

Having said that if you find this product in an offer and would like to see what tunisian crochet can do, if you really like the pattern that comes with it or if you own Dora’s book and would like to see how some of the stitches are worked then I recommend you get this. I don’t believe I would pay the full price but for the US$5 I paid it is very good value for money and I did really enjoy it.

That’s me for today! Will be back soon with tutorials, more reviews and new patterns 🙂

x

Sol