Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

And another week in the dystopian Hellscape has sped right by! Look at them go! Who knew time at the end of American civilization would go so quickly?

I did not get much done on my normal projects this week. I mean, I kept making circles into the void, but I didn’t work on Hannah’s wrap or Adia’s sweater that much. Instead, I made a cat head-shaped coaster pattern. I’m going to be doing a little class at the local cat cafe (Cats N’at – look them up, they have very cute monsters up for adoption) where Hannah and I have been volunteering. They asked for a coaster class, so I made up my own pattern so no one can accuse me of using their pattern without permission.

I tried out the first one during what I feared would be a fraught trip into Pittsburgh to Crochet Club at Contemporary Craft. The NFL draft was going on in the city, so I really feared the entire place would be overrun in a display of sports-based glee that I would fail to understand or appreciate. Thankfully, it was not. Contemporary Craft had a new hook they were using for their classes and asked me to check it out with some of the yarn they will be using. It was a good combo. I made a very happy little cat coaster and suffered no sense of foreboding sports doom at all.

Once I had that one down, I made up another couple coasters at home with a sport weight yarn and a 3 mm hook, thus my new pattern was born. (Please see footnote.) I used Adia’s friends to test the pattern and it went remarkably well, especially considering my two testers/victims do not have a lot of crochet experience.

The next step in my adventure was to write up the pattern. Because I overthink everything, at least twice, I made up two patterns. The first is a quick pattern in standard notation. The second is written the way I used to write patterns for my old blog. I wrote the pattern in standard notation, in long form with no abbreviations, and with an explanation for why things work the way they do. I hope this helps people who are not as familiar with reading crochet patterns learn to read them.

I did not make up diagrams. I just couldn’t. Sometimes, when you live in the middle of the collapse of American society, you have to do little things for morale. Not stressing myself to create the diagram was my little win for the week. We all need them. May you find yours and revel in it.

Anyway, here are the two patterns if you wish to check them out.

Enjoy!

I also created an air plant story that I am calling Tentacles in the Grass, a tale in three pots. The grassy-looking ones are my newest air plants. I consider them to be rescues because the greenhouse that sold them to me didn’t water them at all. They’re recovering nicely.

Footnote: I love the word thus. It works so nicely in a sentence to indicate the flow of one thing to another. You did one thing and thus a second thing happens or is done. Quite frankly, it works much better than “and so and so and so and so on” (with apologies to Gertrude Stein for the paraphrasing and disdain). But I cannot peaceably have thus as my own anymore because now it is the darling of AI. Well, fuck you, AI. You cannot have “thus” or the oxford comma. Cold dead hands, AI. Cold dead hands.