All posts tagged: Tips

Food Scale = Total Game Changer

Between writing free content, self-publishing paid patterns, and completing design commissions, my business is getting to be more stressful and less fulfilling lately. So I’ve been taking a closer look at the pretty crafter photos on social media, searching for tools and tips to make my crochet life easier. A strong tool that I discovered and added into my pattern designing tool kit is a food scale. This is the one I have: Amazon.com – Weighing the Cozy Flowers blanket free pattern coming soon 😍🔥 Instead of just listing the ways I use this digital scale, I thought I’d spend a week taking a snapshot every time I used it. You can really see it in action during my Hexagon Month with Scheepjes Yarns*! Monday In making motifs for Autumn Blues, I figured out how many of the orange centers I could get from one ball of Catona*. I weighed one motif – 6g. Each ball of Catona is 50g, so I can get about 7-8 motifs per ball. This is the most common way I have used …

Hexagon Continuous JAYG – Granny stitch

Hexagon CJAYG PART ONE: Which hexagon pattern can I use for this join? I am using the Tillie Tulip Blog Daisy in this tutorial, but you can choose any pattern you’d like! There are many circle-to-hexagon patterns, as well as plain hexies. You’ll want to keep in mind that with this method, you have to imagine that the “final round” of each hexagon will be the same color. I recommend that you learn the basics of the CJAYG for squares. To clarify, here are some patterns that can be worked with this method. And here are some equally beautiful patterns for which this method cannot be used. The Tillie Tulip Daisy pattern is originally a granny square, and I have used it a couple of times before. What a beautiful square it is! But this time, I have fashioned it into a small hexagon. If you’d like to follow along, go ahead and make up some daisies! I’ll wait 🙂 Hint for making flowers with a center like this one: If you’d like all of …

No Fear: Fixing a Mistake

How I performed surgery on a piece to fix a mistake. Crochet + Scissors = Faint. I see crochet and knit artists alike asking amongst themselves if it is better to leave an error be as if it were fate, or to frog back and fix it, for fear of being forever haunted by its presence. Sometimes you don’t have a choice. One time I was in such a hurry to experiment with a new border that I’d been wanting to try that I literally worked all of the perimeter motifs in a blanket just so I could jump ahead. BUT, I erroneously worked in two extra motifs on one of the sides, causing that side to be wider… I hacked it apart with scissors, natch. Here are the gruesome details in an excerpt from the original BabyLove Brand blog post in early 2013. * * * * * Cruising along – Everything is looking fabulous at this point but I started getting a serious itch to see how my squared edge and lace border would come …