Crochet 1-2-3 Issue 11
What the archive says about Issue 11
Issue 11 of Crochet 1-2-3 was announced in March 2014 for release that May. The clearest surviving record of that announcement is not a publisher press release but a personal post by the designer who had just been hired to write the "Technique 1-2-3" column for the magazine. In a March 23, 2014 entry on her own site, she explained that Issue 11 would carry her first column in the new role, and that the assignment required her to film demonstration videos of the techniques she would be explaining. That single post is the strongest evidence of what Issue 11 was meant to deliver, and it is worth reading in her own words on Mamas2Hands.
What the post does not say matters just as much. She names no full table of contents, no cover project, and no specific technique destined for the column. Any list you may find elsewhere that assigns a topic to Issue 11 should be treated with care unless it traces back to the magazine itself. The saved page for the issue on this site carries no readable body text, so the designer's account remains the primary window into that moment.
Who was writing the Technique 1-2-3 column?
The designer describes herself as a fiber artist, crochet designer, teacher and illustrator. Her post states plainly that writing the "Technique 1-2-3" articles for Crochet 1-2-3 was a new role for her, with Issue 11 as her first column in it. The post does not claim she had written for the magazine before, and it does not establish her as the author of other features in the issue. Earlier issues, such as the guides to issue 5 and issue 8, carried their own contents, and nothing in this March 2014 post rewrites that history.
She also names her editor, Kimberly McAlindin, as editor in chief of the magazine. That detail helps place the editorial structure behind the column at the time the videos were commissioned.
Why did the column need videos?
The magazine asked its Technique 1-2-3 writer to produce videos demonstrating the techniques alongside the written column. For a beginner facing a new stitch, this pairing makes sense: a written description tells you where the hook goes, while film shows the rhythm of the hands, the tension of the yarn and the small pauses that text rarely captures. Readers following the basics today can test the same idea themselves by reading a written tutorial, such as the half double crochet guide, and pausing at each step to picture the motion it describes.
Could a phone really film a crochet technique?
The designer assumed she would need a dedicated digital camcorder. Her editor told her she recorded her own videos on a smart phone, which surprised her enough to test her own device, a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 she had bought the previous March for her business. She reports being pleased with the quality of the footage it produced. For a crafter on a budget, that is a useful historical data point: the barrier to demonstrating a stitch on film was already low in 2014, and it has only dropped since.
The tripod hunt in Boulder
A camera alone was not enough, because she needed both hands free to demonstrate. She went to Mike's Camera, a shop in Boulder, Colorado, expecting a quick purchase. The store carried many tripods designed for the iPhone but few options that fit a phone as large as hers, and a camera specialist at the shop eventually helped her match a tripod to the device. She chose a Joby Mpod Mini, a small tripod with bendable legs, partly because the legs could grip the top of her regular camera tripod and partly because the design left the phone screen unobstructed while filming.
How do you get a camera to the right height?
The bendable tripod solved one problem and exposed another. On the dining room table it sat too low, while her full-size tripod stood too high. A small box hit the right height but wobbled and tipped. Her fix: a glass jar filled with pennies and decorative marbles for weight, the small tripod clamped around the lid, and purple duct tape holding everything steady once the angled camera still wanted to topple. The setup is improvised, but the reasoning is sound, and any reader who has propped a phone against a yarn ball to film a swatch will recognize the problem.
Where the filming happened
Her studio was her dining room table. A large window on the left supplied natural light, and the table had room for a backdrop, an additional light and the project supplies each technique required. In the post she expressed hope of eventually filming in her design office or art studio, or possibly both depending on the craft being shown. Whether that move ever happened before the magazine's run ended, the page does not say, so the record stops at the dining room.
Reading the column against the stitches themselves
The Technique 1-2-3 format, a numbered breakdown of a technique, works best when you can check each written step against the stitch as it exists in your hands. This site keeps reference pages for exactly that comparison: the stitch definitions give the vocabulary, and the gauge and swatch guidance tells you whether your version of the stitch matches the dimensions the pattern expects. A filmed demonstration, like the ones the designer was preparing in spring 2014, covers the motion; written definitions cover the naming; a swatch covers the result. All three together are how a confident beginner confirms a technique.
What remains open about Issue 11
The designer closed her post by inviting readers to watch for her first videos that May and judged her first attempt at video work fairly decent by her own standard. Beyond that, the archive is quiet. The post announces the column and documents the filming; it does not publish the column's technique, the issue's projects or its other pages. Readers researching the issue can follow the links above to compare its announced column with the written stitch record this site preserves, and to the designer's own account for the parts of the story only she told.