Fair enough. I mean this type of feedback is indeed exactly what I was asking for. I regularly try to give beginners reality checks in other crafts that I do have experience in and I figured I probably needed one of those ;) thanks for taking the time.

Makes a lot of sense. As the other commenter suggested I think I’ll work myself through the different stitches this project is tagged with one at a time. Might even find some with a lower difficulty on ravelry that I can get excited about while I’m on my way to learning enough to tackle this. Thanks!

Oooh, thank you. It’s also my first time on ravelry and I hadn’t noticed that it’s tagged with the stitch types. Makes a lot of sense to work through those first one after the other. Picking a challenging project I can get really excited about as my first project is usually something I have a surprising amount of success with with crafting, but I suspect this one is just too far out of reach for now. I’ll find some lower hanging fruit to get excited about to get me closer to knowing all the stitches required. Thanks again.

Sadly a lot if not most of these changes will take generations to reverse. It’s the sad reality of things.

The main good thing I am taking from the news currently is that as far as I can tell the people won’t accept this for very long. Can’t quite yet tell how or what will happen, but I’d be surprised if the current regime are still in power in the same way 1-2 years from now. The protest are amping up at an intense speed, the videos coming out of the few republicans still giving town halls feel like the crowd is a pot about to boil over.

Makes sense. This is doing decades of damage. Plenty of past groundbreaking research came out of the US. But I get it. I wouldn’t want to move to the US either for very much the same reasons. Lack of affordable healthcare, lack of paid holidays and gun safety would be the main reasons. Lack of food regulation would also be a concern. And now the current regime and the way too large chunk of the population that still seems happy with it means we put even tourist travel plans to the US on hold. Too scary at the moment. Trying to help the best I can from here, but there’s only so much you can do at a distance.

All numbers I’ve seen for record applications were for high level research and university level teaching. Maybe the medical doctors mainly moved states? At least I haven’t seen them making headlines about moving to Europe.

And as far as I’ve seen the numbers it’s working too. Anywhere in Europe that is academic or sciency is seeing record numbers of Americans applying. The brain drain will be real.

Love a good info dump and really appreciate the explanation. I think you’d be quite happy checking out Sally Pointer on YouTube. She has a lot of info on working with natural fibers. Don’t think she has anything on hemp specifically but I think a lot of her videos are going to be applicable to hemp too. Things like slightly wetting the fiber before working with it are probably things that are going to be quite useful. But it might just be that hemp doesn’t crochet well. She also has many videos on different ways to make fiber into things that are a lot older than crochet and they seemingly all require less looping and bending. She does do a lot of infodumping too, but if you mind that you can always skip over those parts.

That looks like very interesting yarn to work with. Did you spin it yourself by any chance? Feel like elaborating on why you picked it?