Monthly Archives: September 2014

Try, Try Again

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As much as I’d like to share a post about a successful project that’s DONE (on the heels of my failed attempt to salvage an old project), here’s another cautionary tale. This time, it’s about the importance of counting your stitches when working crochet in the round… even when your pattern doesn’t provide a stitch/chain space count for a particular round. Especially when the pattern doesn’t provide a count. Do the math. Count the stitches.

If you zone out during a simultaneous Netflix/crochet session (ahem), you’ll make a rookie-level mistake that costs you hours and hours of effort. See that out-of-focus loop in the center of this (terribly blurry, so sorry) snapshot? Yep, that’s one skipped stitch that completely wrecked the tension and counts on every subsequent round.

Skipped Crochet Stitch

Which means all of the off-white stitches in the photo below have now been frogged – a process that took twenty minutes in itself. It’s times like these that it’s important to remember that the process, not the finished product, is what I really enjoy. 🙂 So help me feel better about this – what frustrating crochet/knitting mistakes have you made?

Table Topper

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Some Projects Can’t Be Saved

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I was revisiting one of my early projects, the Cutie Pie Doily, since at the time I made it I was soooo proud of my effort. It was one of the first doilies I made, and certainly my first beaded project.

Here it is as I originally shared it. In a word, FAIL.

Beaded Cutie Pie Doily

I recently thought that by going back and trying to block it again, I could salvage it. I was so wrong. It’s just a complete mess. It’s plagued by tension problems, and the crowning “achievement” is the last few rows where I apparently decided to go rogue and disregard the pattern. (Why?)

CutiePieDoily2

The blocking itself is not that great this time either. I phoned it in as I got to the outer edges, realizing that even the best blocking wasn’t going to save this one.

It is a tiny bit better, but it’s hard to believe I entered it as a contest project. I’m not really very excited that I decided to share it here in the first place, honestly. But it’s important to have perspective on projects that didn’t work. I can be quite stubborn about trying to execute a pattern that just doesn’t play nice with my gauge and yarn choices. (I think, sadly, I’ve been working on one of those recently.)

So how about you? Have any projects that you thought were amazing when you finished them, but make you cringe now?

CutiePieDoily

Getting Started

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Do you remember learning how to knit or crochet? When you’ve been doing something for a long time, it’s hard to remember where you started and how difficult it was. That’s certainly the case for me – I’d rather forget the frustration and frogging. 🙂

A woman named Dayna has started posting about a series of challenges that her family and friends have given her to help her learn new things and get outside her comfort zone. Aside from being a great idea in general (who hasn’t made a “bucket list” at one point?) I love that one of her challenges was to learn how to crochet from her mom.

It seems that, more often than not, this type of craft is passed down from one generation to another. It just makes the hobby that much more meaningful. Who taught you to knit or crochet?