Crochet Practice 2: Warm Ups and Pitfalls
This week, I crocheted 2 pumpkins, since fall is my favourite season and I wanted to make something simple and fun. I was also feeling off about my crocheting skills after I kept messing up last week, so I wanted to make an easy pattern as a mental reset. I treated these pumpkins like a warm up for the bigger project I want to do.
I started with making a mini pumpkin. I found a pattern on Ravelry, which is free to view here. This was a simple pattern with written instructions, which was good practice for me. I found out after I had finished most of the project that there was actually a video attached with instructions, but I tried not to rely on it.
The pattern required crocheting a rectangle, then crocheting the two short ends closed to make a cylinder, then sewing the final ends together to form a pumpkin shape.
This pumpkin was a good exercise for not following a pattern exactly, but still making it work. Both the video and the written pattern had confusing steps for closing both ends of the pumpkin, so I had to improvise a way to close it off.
I definitely didn’t use the proper technique, but it looks fine and won’t fall apart. Most importantly, I’m proud of how it turned out, and I completed my goal of finishing a project, even if it was small.
Then, I moved on to crocheting a larger pumpkin (also from Ravelry, pattern is free here) because I wanted to practice a more complicated pattern. I realized while working on this one that I love the repetitive part of crocheting. I work best when I can get into a rhythm, and get stressed when I have to switch from repetitive rounds to the next.
The pattern was going really well, but when I got to the last few stitches of the round, I panicked. Since I had been doing a good job of following the pattern so far, and the pumpkin was looking good, I didn’t want to keep going and mess it up.
I still haven’t finished the larger pumpkin, and that is making me feel worse about my progress.
This was a learning experience, to show me that even though I’m worried about messing up, I can always undo mistakes if needed. This was also a good exercise for seeing issues that may come up when working on my larger crochet project.
My plans for next week are to finish off the larger pumpkin that I started and begin working on the bag that I want to make.
I’ve been treating the bag as a big final project that I want to spend time building my skills towards, but thinking about it in this way is making it more intimidating. I think the best course of action is to just get started on the project and leave myself more time for fixing mistakes as they come up.