Pig Cloth tail

I'm currently working on the Squiggles the Pig washcloth which is on Knitting Knonsense, and am having a challenging time with the "tail" instructions. Thanks to Mouse Potato, I have a better understanding of the crochet instructions (I don't know how to crochet), and she gave me a wonderful alternative method to doing the tail.

I started out by chaining 9, but then tail seemed to long ... plus as it was my first attempt I crocheted too loosely and there were lots of big holes. And I mean BIG holes the size of Texas! Much of my problem had to do with not knowing how to crochet, and as a result, I found it difficult to hold the work plus try to hold the yarn to yarn over the hook. It all felt very awkward. And I started out with large loose chains to make it easier to stick the hook through the loops when I did the SCs. The first time around, I was holding the thing upsidedown, cuz it seemed easier to try to jab the hook through 1-loop, instead of the 2-loop V (does that make sense??), and because of this I ended up inserting the hook in the wrong direction.

On my 3rd attempt, I chained 7 to make a shorter tail. This is the tail you see above. You can see it is tighter at the beginning, and then got more sloppy near the end. It was challenging to get the hook through the chains, especially in the last 2 chains (when things seemed to get tighter). And I was working with a splitty cotton yarn. Most of the time I felt like I was using the Force, jab jab jab, oh got it in, yay!

The photo below shows this tail attempt with the cloth, so you can see the size of the tail relative to the pig on the cloth. The white yarn marks where I will join the tail.

.