Crochet Crazy

So, with any luck by now you grabbed a couple of peices of wool and had a go at the diamond shape, and had success in changing colours. If not, feel free to drop me a note and I will update a Q&A part.

Now, a simple shape you drew is all well and good, but we had a proper picture/set of shapes in mind did we not?

Word to the wise

The important thing is to not get flustered, here are some things to bear in mind

1. You can never count your foundation row enough. I count mine like 5 times and still it seems its nearly always wrong.

2. You will mess up, you will either not change, or change on the wrong stitch, merge stitches (a personal fave). Now, if you merge stitches you have a choice, depending on your pattern you can “add” a stitch back in usually without too much fuss where you swap colours. If you just change at the wrong time, often unless its a very symmetrical balanced piece, you can get away with it.

3. If all else fails and you have to unwind a bunch of rows, try not to want to burn it and give up. (see An example of how I stuff up)

Try and look on each mistake as making an item unique – and if you can bear to leave it, in someways its best as your recipient indeed has a unique item, even if you made 3 the same chances are you wouldn’t make the same mistake.

Now, earlier I showed how to make a pattern using microsoft paint, its a terrible program but it is free. However, not all programs need be terrible – I also mentioned cross stitch programs too I feel, so.. lets take a look

Software

Now, Ursasoftware have a product called x-stitch which is pretty awsome and it will print your patterns with counts for crochet. I feel theres a number of ways of counting your stitches and what you’re doing – I will explain that later. You can download their software here <click to go to download>

There is another called PCStitch both work in a similar manner, either will do, as in effect as I explained its the coloured squares we’re after! <click to go to download>

Any software of similar nature can be used to design our patterns for us – both of these offer an ability to import a picture, reduce the number of colours, swap and replace colouirs, draw on your picture to maybe touch up some rough edges and of course save/print the instructions.

Most things these days either have help files, forums or videos on how to. Both the above products are intuitive to use for what we want which is import picture make it x stitches by y (ignore the dpi part as that used for size of work when finished for cross stitches) and to tidy it a little to make it nice and simple. Now, if the picture you wanted is near enough the size you want, dont worry about a handful of stitches bigger, it probably only works out as an inch or two so will be fine.

The key thing you will generally find is that unless you got a bmp format picture, there will be blending on your picture where what maybe was black and white to you when you looked actually had a few grey pixels to make it look smoother – these pesky things are the things we as crochetters will want to remove to simplify our pictures where possible. You can either do a replace colour or tweak by hand, either works depending on your picture, patience and steady hands.