Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Oh Harbinger of Autumn, how you vex me! I had such dreams of the perfection I would create only to have those visions smashed by the reality of my own shortcomings! I have been frogging and reworking and frogging and getting very frustrated. I think I have it now, but let’s look at my failures and discuss. 

First we have my original plan. Gaze with wonder at its poorly conceived execution! I really thought this was going to be it. It very clearly was not. Perhaps if I had bumped up the hook size for the moss stitch portion? I do think it was a bit stiff for a wrap. A larger hook would have helped, but I had already done the math for where to attach the flowers and I didn’t want to think that much about it. This is a poor way to conduct oneself, I know, but here we are. 

Perhaps if I had just worked little moss stitch patches of the yellows and oranges instead of the flowers? I think if I tried this plan again, I would do exactly that. I would bump up the hook size and work the patches of yellow and orange in moss stitch or some other happy stitch. I think that could work nicely. I could also work it with varying sizes of square motifs. I think that would look cool. Maybe that’s what I should try next time or if there is yarn left over. 

Perhaps if I had worked more than a few inches of it before I scrapped the whole thing and frogged it? Hmmm. I don’t know. I wasn’t happy with it, so it had to go. I’m a very impatient designer and if the first little bit of something doesn’t make me giddy with joy to see the rest of it, I am likely to scrap it and run away. I’m sure this says something terrible about my personality. I do not care, which likely says something even worse. 

For my next trick, I decided to make all of the parts out of flowers. I reclaimed the yarn from the first attempt and made some nice motif flowers. I wanted to make something more organic so I tried to place the flowers in a more amorphous way. I planned to start with dark flowers, barring the two light ones I made from the frogged yarn at the bottom of the would-be triangle, and slowly morph them to lighter flowers by changing one strand in the marl each time I decided to change colors. I was going to be spontaneous! I was going to let the spirits of color guide my hand. These grand ideas were all thrown out a mere 17 motifs in when I decided it looked clumpy and strange instead of flowing and elegant. 

See? I told you I was impatient. What this really needed to succeed was a mess of motifs in varying colors that I could arrange and sew together at the end or a really solid drawing to work from. I did not have that sort of drawing or the interest to make one. I could have made a pile of motifs and sewn them together at the end. It really wouldn’t have been much extra work, but impatience won out and I stopped. 

My next attempt was not better. I went back to the original plan of blocks of color made up of the flower motifs with pops of yellow and orange thrown in. I changed one color in the marl every so many rows and ended up with something that looked even more blocky and strange. I stopped that one too, though I did get farther along on it than any of the others. Perhaps this is because I was cannibalizing the last one to get flowers for this one.

I went to bed feeling grumpy and like I hoped there was some yarn leftover from this project for me to try something without marling the colors because the colors look really nice together just as they are. Oh happy crocheter, when you are making up a project and your brain whines something like this at you, listen to it. I had set out to make marled blocks of color and then marled flowers and ended up hating it all, while desperately wanting to try something with these colors without the marled effect. I need to allow myself to scrap a whole plan instead of only parts of it, or at least to allow myself to scrap the right parts. Don’t be like me. Really analyze what isn’t working in a project before you just grab up a hook and yarn and plunge into the next failure. 

I now have what I hope is the final form for this project. I am still holding two strands together because there is a deadline and I would really like to meet it. I am still working with the flowers because they speak of happiness and joy. The flowers are each made with two strands of the same colored yarn because I like them much better that way. I am stealing the dark blue and purple marled flowers from the earlier incarnations of this wrap because they have a certain iridescence that makes me happy, and I made a lot of those: I might need the yarn to finish the project. Arranged this way, it makes me think of light on the water. The little yellow and orange flowers can be little fish in this scenario. Look at that! Actual abstraction. That feels weird. But I think I like the weird. I’m going to lean into that and see where I end up!