When Work & Crochet Collide

Today I discovered something amazing in my pursuit of crochet, and that is raffia. I had been looking for raffia to crochet a summer sun hat, but I did not know the name of it. I had been searching around for "craft straw" and "basket straw." Somehow I discovered its name today, and I started to get ready for crocheting a summer hat. I am armed with a sun hat pattern, and I have just ordered raffia from RaffiaOnline.com. However, I am desperately trying to learn how to crochet with raffia (is it different from crochet with yarn? are there any special pointers?).

As you may or may not know, I work in online marketing. I know a lot about search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Like 74% of the country, I use Google for searching on the Internet. Today, however, Google was of no use to me in my pursuit to learn how to crochet with raffia. All results on the first page of Google were for Crochet Raffia products for sale. I finally thought, I will give Bing a shot. (For those of you who have not seen the multi-million dollar ad campaign, Bing.com is MSN's revised search engine.) I have tested Bing before just for kicks, but I never seriously considered using it until today. My first search on Bing actually yielded impressive results! I searched "how to crochet raffia," and the first result was this book on Amazon.com. While I don't know yet if the book (entitled How to Make Raffia Hats, Bags & Baskets) is crochet-specific, it did help give me the idea to look more on Amazon. Bing also gave me a result for how to crochet with wire that mentions raffia. Nothing ground-breaking, but still much better results than Google.

Unrelated update: my Polaroid camera arrived today!