Hello friends,
I know I've been away for a long time. Mainly because I couldn't figure out what to do with this blog along with needing a break from writing. It took my most recent project to inspire me for a direction for this blog-project help.
How many times have you been super excited about a pattern, either quickly downloaded it if it was free or hemmed and hawed for an hour...a day...whatever deciding whether you want to purchase it? The latter can go longer if it involves having to purchase a book to get that one pattern you fell in love with a photo of oh Pinterest or Ravelry. Once you have the pattern, you round up the yarn from your stash, pull out the correct sized needles or hooks and steel yourself for creating your own masterpiece version. Come on, it didn't look that difficult.
The first reason for me choosing to be a help blog...the 60 Quick Knits series of books. My first piece of sage advice? Read the reviews!! Even if you are all about supporting your local businesses so you're planning on buy a book at a brick and mortar or by mail-order from a small business that doesn't post reviews - go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and read the reviews. Had I done this I would not have bought one book from this series much less two. After the fact I did this and I also got into conversations on Facebook and Ravelry groups to find out it wasn't just me who ran into errata and false expectations. It was the first time I went looking for help. For this instance it was fairly easy to find the information I was looking for.
I'm sure you have at least one pattern that has presented some challenges and you went looking for help but it's not a pattern that on Ravelry has 50 projects done with it. Maybe it's not even on Ravelry. Maybe it's out of print. When you go searching on Pinterest it's just links to the page on the publisher's site or Etsy. There are no notes. No help. Now you turn to Google. If you find any information it's a picture or a link to where to acquire the pattern but there's no help.
I want to tip my hat at this point to my brother and sister yarncrafters who have the skills & talents to do video tutorials. I have at least two online video teachers who are my go-to's but even they only address specific patterns occasionally. I was really lucky that my favorite instructor recently partnered with the yarn manufacturer whose kit I had bought and she had a complete tutorial on the pattern. This was huge and I'll explain why in another blog post about that pattern.
So for those of you who do better with the written word who are struggling with some of the patterns I have knitted or crochets, here I am. Please put questions in the comments and I will tell you how I resolved them. However, please do not ask about the seed-stitch beanie in 60 Quick Luxury Knits. I have tried to get past the second row after the i-cord tail on the top and given up. I will say there are a lot of notes on individuals projects on Ravelry along with questions that have been answered by the designer. None of them helped even after I went with a normal i-cord rather than the seed stitch version the pattern starts with.
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