1. to confuse, bewilder, or stupefy
2. to make obscure or unclear
3. to darken
Just thought I’d start off this post with a little vocabulary lesson. Now that we’re all on the same page (i.e. completely in the dark) I can go on to confuse readers even further about my experiences with making a pattern for crochet.
It started innocently enough… As a little yellow post-it note on which I had doodled an idea for a sweater while at work. Somehow that little idea ballooned into a massive project that has consumed every free hour I have had between work and sleep for the last few weeks.
I had mistakenly thought that creating my own pattern would be pretty easy. I have a pretty good idea of how sweaters are put together (I’ve certainly made enough of them to know!) I can crochet in my sleep, and I can do a decent job of keeping track of what I’ve stitched. Simple, right? Not always so!
I began my “little” project by picking up the remnants of variegated yarn from the Doris Chan sweater I had just completed as well as a handful of hooks and settled myself down near the laptop to get started. I had already been on Ravelry (www.ravelry.com) perusing different techniques and had become enamored by the idea of slip stitches. I dug out a largish hook and went to work slip stitching to my heart’s content, making a very promising ribbed fabric that would become the base of my sweater.
So far so good! I whipped up the ribbed torso in no time and set about trying to calculate how to begin the lace section for the bust area. Now things start to become a little muddled. I’m surrounded by papers with doodles, scribbled graphs and some sketchy math, not to mention the 12 different windows I have open on my laptop as I try to reconcile stitch counts and pattern repeats. With some calculator work that borders on the mystical I managed to get the bust area going in my chosen lace pattern, although I’m now popping up from the couch every 10 minutes to try on the sweater in front of the mirror with each row repeat.
Somehow I make it to the next portion- where I have to start thinking about neck and arm-hole shaping. What a pain! I stitch. I turn and record on the computer. I stitch. I record again. I stitch. I delete the last row and have to frog it back. I try again. I FINALLY get one side of the neckline/arm-hole done. Praise be to the patron saint of lost causes! I quickly reword the neckline for the second side and stitch it up in a jiffy.
Now I’m stoked. I’ve got the whole front done. The back should be super easy.
Yep. Super easy. I end off for the back and sew the front and back together. It’s looking like a sweater! I rush to try it on in front of the mirror. Not too shabby! Now I just have to do the sleeves and I’m home free.
Back to the computer and the calculator to figure out the mysteries of sleeves… Eventually I come up with a design that seems to work and after another agonizing session of stitch-type-stitch-type I get a passable sleeve done and sew it into the arm hole. I’m flabbergasted to find that the sleeve fits in just perfectly. Now how in the hell did I do that? Beginner’s luck, I assume. I try it on and am pleased (more like dumbfounded) to find that it fits perfectly! In a state of deluded bliss I forgo the second sleeve and neckline edging and scamper off to the store to get some nice yarn to make the real thing.
After choking on the price of 100% wool yarn bought at the craft store I bring my precious cargo back home and dig in once again to my pattern. It seems like such a breeze now. I practically know the pattern by heart, but for the sake of double-checking myself I force myself to follow my pattern exactly. To no avail.
Evidently the variegated yarn while sold as worsted weight is most definitely not when compared to the Cascade 220 I am working with for the second round. My pattern is now horribly off. I consider briefly what a bonfire of yarn and scrap notes would look like in my back yard before putting my nose back to the grindstone.
I rework the pattern for the yarn.
Surprisingly once the initial gauges are accounted for in the pattern things start to work out again. I breathe a sigh of relief and manage to finish the sweater. Now I feel like doing cartwheels (and I would if I could manage it without injury.) I’ve made a successful clothing pattern!
I do a rather embarrassing dance around the house before settling down with my pattern again. I reflect that any good pattern maker will include sizing options. Now I want to bash my head in with the laptop, but computers are prohibitively expensive so I don’t. Instead I do more online research for sizing. I fill my brain with all sorts of useful tidbits and info and then promptly forget it all when I try to crunch the numbers and alter the pattern for different sizes.
It takes me almost a week to get the numbers to at least make some sort of sense for a larger size. I consider making more sizes, but I do like being out among the sane people, so I don’t bother with more than one other size. I’d rather not be committed to the mental institution just yet, thank you.
Now that I have the sizing somewhat represented I decide I absolutely need to make schematics and diagrams. I know some people only use the written patterns, but they drive me as nuts reading them as they do writing them! If there are indeed others like me out there (god forbid) then stitch diagrams and detailed schematics with proper lengths/widths are a must. Too bad I had forgotten that I have lost the discs for my graphics programs.
Stuck with what I would term as a below-basic imaging program (read: MS Paint) I meticulously cut and pasted, drew and erased my pitiful line drawings until I had something that resembled schematics and stitch diagrams. Whew!
Finally, FINALLY, I pull it all together in a Word document. A 5MB Word document. Hmmm… That is a little mucho, but what’s a girl to do? No way am I dumping any bit of that damned pattern now, not after having slogged through so many hours of work! I guess all there is to do now is cross my fingers and have someone else give it a go before trying to unload it on an unsuspecting public.
This should be amusing, if not downright painful, if the pattern doesn’t work out. Hopefully in a few weeks there will be a pattern available, possibly for sale on Ravelry. If it doesn’t all come crashing down around my ears there may be more patterns available in the future! Stay tuned.
A sneak preview of the Bettie Sweater.-Lyzard
