Stitch Diagrams

Sometimes I worry that my photo illustrations of stitches might be hard to read simply because yarn tends to be fuzzy.

So I went to the kids' crafts department at Jo-Ann Fabrics yesterday, and I found some thin cording.  It seemed to me that this plastic spaghetti would be more "legible" in a diagram.

The cording had been cut into short-ish lengths, so each row of crochet took a separate piece.

Here's the result being photographed:
 

For the photo, I taped the unruly plastic swatch to a sheet of paper.  I turned the photo into a sketch in Picasa, where I also added the title and explanatory text.  Then I used Paint to add the back-loop arrows.  The finished diagram is at the top of this post.

For comparison's sake, here's an earlier effort with yarn: