I love patterns, collect them and work all kinds of patterns. But…..I don’t think I have ever made a pattern exactly as it says, ever.
Sometimes that causes all kinds of problems for me…I have to rework things because I decided to play around. Many times I have something unplanned and beautiful occur. There have been plenty of bombs too, total fails, but you do learn from all projects. I think of a pattern like a suggestion of how to get to the end product. You can change color, size, tension whatever you want to play with.
Color is one of the easiest things to change, just put your color in place of the suggested color and head on and get exactly what you want. I love bright, hurt your eyes color and tend to combine colors in ways that most people don’t. Most of the time I do pretty good, and if it totally sucks I can just pull it out and start over. Over the years of crocheting I have gotten very good at saving yarn by pulling projects out.
Since I’m such a yarn hoarder and saver most of the patterns I make I just use part of my stash. I also tie the skeins together, don’t have any scrap yarn and never pay much attention to the amount of yarn that I use for a project.
When I start a new afghan pattern or even dish pattern I always try to figure out how many chains have to be added or subtracted to increase and decrease the pattern. I’m bad about changing the pattern’s size to fit where I want it.
So let’s leave this with what do you change in the patterns you make. Do you make the pattern exactly as written or do you play with aspects of it, let me know in the comments below.
I am a religious pattern follower…or am I? I would never make a gauge swatch and almost never stopped to measure and hope the pattern came out as it was supposed to be. Now, as I learn more about the craft i feel like I can be a bit more creative with my stitching.
I learned to crochet by creating my own patterns, in fact I didn’t learn to read a pattern until I was in my mid-20’s, and I learned to crochet when I was 5years old. All my teachers were right handed. I’m left handed so there wasn’t much in the way of tutorials so I just learned as I went. By the time I started with patterns I was use to doing it my way, lol.