Posts Tagged ‘annoying’

Dave Capisano

Attention new crocheters, there’s something you should know!

Designers sometimes make up their own names for stitch patterns.

The good news is that this means that designers will usually define their special stitches right there in the pattern, so they could call it a Shazbut Special, and it wouldn’t matter because they tell you what it is.

The bad news is that finding more help on these stitch patterns isn’t easy. That pattern the designer called the Shazbut Special might be called Busker’s Delight by the person who posted the tutorial video to youtube.

I bring this up because I recently came across a pattern that called for the moss stitch. Before this point in my life, I was only aware of the moss stitch as refered to by knitters. Luckily, there was a link to a youtube tutorial.

I made up a swatch:
DSC03863
We’ll call this one “Moss Stitch HalfDouble-SlipStitch” because it’s made up of a pattern of *hdc, slst* repeated, with each subsequent row made up of doing an hdc into a slst, and a slst into an hdc.

Those instructions might sound a little bit familiar to some of you, as they are eerily similar to this:
DSC03865
which we’ll call “Moss Stitch Double-Single”, and some of you might recognise as the stitch pattern I use in my Diet Coke Bottle Cozies. Basically, it is a row of *dc, sc* repeated, and in subsequent rows you work a dc into a sc, and a sc into a dc. I didn’t know it was called “moss stitch” when I chose it for my cozies… I just thought it looked neat. Not too stretchy, not too tight.

Finally, there is a third stitch pattern that is referred to as “moss stitch”:
DSC03862
and we’ll call it “Moss Stitch Single-Chain1″ for it is made by repeating *sc, ch1* a bunch of times (and ending with a sc), and in subsequent rows you work your sc into the ch1 space.

I’d say this one has the nicest drape of the three moss stitches, and it didn’t curl up in the corners like the others. I do believe I’m going to make a blanket using this stitch. We’ll see!

Extra bonus today:

I tried out the stitch height experiment with two colours.
DSC03860
It’s a bit wonky, but I think that would go away with a larger example. What do you think?

THE

It’s going well. Slowly, (and with about a million ends already), but well.

THE!
(Click to see a bigger version!)

I’ve decided to forget about “Let’s play”, mostly because it took most of the day just to chart out the rest… and most of the rest of the day to figure out where the middle is. If it looks off-centre, that’s only because the middle turns out to be right near the right edge of the E in “THE”.

I think I’m going to go back to making circle-in-a-square motifs… chaining letters is fiddly and annoying, and not condusive to following Rome.

Murphy’s Law: A Practical Application

“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

Sunday, August 30, 2009 started early for us. Up at 5:30am, I headed over to the Always Open convenience store to get some milk and a coffee for Charles. It was moving day, and mostly everything was packed; we didn’t want to have to move an entire kitchen’s worth of food, so the coffee-making supplies were packed and when we ran out of milk on Saturday, we decided to rely on the nearby convenience store, whose name really bears repeating: Always Open.

When I got there, I saw this:

(This is a story of epic proportions with lots of pictures, read on under the cut!)
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