Day 167 and Run With It

I take a lot of my cues from stitch dictionaries. They're a big fat source of scarves waiting to happen all in one spot. Seventy percent of the time, you can pick a stitch, make a long rectangle and call it a day. Twenty five percent of the time, you can pick a stitch, make a long rectangle, put a border on it and call it a day. It's the last five percent that give you trouble. The last five percent are motifs so you have to make a bunch of them and seam like crazy. The last five percent are embellishment pieces that you can use to add to a scarf, but not make a whole one as is. The last five percent and this is the big one are stitch patterns that make you pull your hair out.

Sometimes the pattern is written incorrectly and you have to try to fix the mistake as you go. Sometimes the terms are in opposite terms of what you're used to and you end up with an entire pattern repeat before you realize that anything is wrong. Sometimes, it's just not a clearly written pattern and every single row you're wondering why you can't get the edges straight or the fabric to lay flat or the bits and bobs of the pattern to look anything like the demonstrated picture.

I say FORGET IT! Fudge that pattern all you want and when you start getting something attractive, RUN WITH IT! I don't know where I heard this quote, but it's been one of my favorites when being creative: A lone mistake is just a mistake, but a mistake repeated is a new pattern. I don't know what was going on with this particular stitch but it was just not happening for me. When it started to look pretty, I just repeated whatever it was I'd been doing. Being the laid back person that I am, I called it happy and I called it a day.