As a crocheter, I love yarn. But I like yarn best when it is doing what I want and I'm not mucking things all up.
My eldest daughter asked me to make her a blankie that she could snuggle with. Naturally, I love making things, especially when one of my children asks me to. I set out to find a pattern that I liked and was relatively unsuccessful. I did find a picture of a blanket that I thought was really awesome, but the pattern for it was $28. RIDICULOUS.
Why, would I, someone who has been crocheting for years and years, ever want to pay that much for a pattern? I can understand if it was some dynamically awesome blanket that also did your chores for you, or perhaps crocheted itself, but really, that was ridiculous.
So, I did what I always do, and zoomed in and enhanced the photo of the afghan and began to test. I tried about ten different stitches, still am not sure what kind of stitch it is. I ended up doing a granny style version of it, and it's looking pretty good.
Except... there are a number of "fails"
Sometimes, I pull all the yarn out and remove the "fails" and other times, they serve to my advantage. None of the fails are going to make the blanket fall apart, they're just simple errors in my calculation that make the piece either not match the pattern, or they take on a life of their own.
Fail #1- I didn't swatch the colors to see how they would go together, and now, after having done the whole center of the blanket, I've decided that I wouldn't have done the color pattern this way if I had been paying attention properly when I began. So do I pull the whole thing apart or scrap what I've got and start over? No, I've decided that I'm going to embrace the color pattern in the center and continue on with what I had planned and let it have a unique middle to it.
Fail #2- I didn't check the brand or dye lot of the purple that I had been using when I started the afghan when I went and bought a whole new pound of yarn. They don't match, albeit they're close. I can't take the new yarn back because I've already ripped into it and started unraveling the skein. I could rip all of the piece apart and replace the other purple with this purple and fix "Fail #1" with this as well, but I've decided once again, to let my flaws shine a little and let it be.
Fail #3- After switching colors as I had wanted to (remember Fail #1) I started the next row with the wrong color! How did I do that? I certainly thought I knew what I was doing... And what's even worse is that I managed to get all the way through that color- 5 rounds, and three rounds into the next before I noticed and decided that this wasn't right. This time, I pulled out my error. I had only been working on one side of the piece and decided that this was worth pulling out the yarn. My bad. whoops. Hopefully when I reattach the yarn I do a better job of paying attention.
So why am I sharing this with you? For two reasons-
1: My whole pattern creation process more or less defines why I offer my patterns up for free. Chances are, if you're a crocheter, then you have a basic knowledge of the stitches and can do exactly what I did. You too can look at a picture and design your own pattern based off of it, and perhaps even come up with something cooler than your example. I figure, I did it, you can do it too, so I may as well save you the hassle and share it with you as well. After all, crochet love is universal, right? (And a mighty shout out to my peeps from the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany who all popped up on my visitors list!)
2: I am also sharing this with you because sometimes it's okay to have "Fails" in your craft, and it's also okay to embrace those failures and learn from them. Sometimes you have to do the right thing and backtrack, and other times you can let that little fail be your signature on the piece. The important thing is to enjoy yourself and to not let the little fails be something that stops you from doing something you love.
