I finshied my Weasley Sleeves but ran out of time to get them attached to a housecoat or sweater in time to wear them to the launch party for the new Harry Potter book. It was a shame, because I’ve little doubt that I would have been competition for the adult winner of the costume contest.

Oh well. I’ll fix them up for Halloween and then detach them and put them on a jacket for the little Grump. She really loves them and thinks that they will look extremely funky. (She wants them because they’re so different than anything anyone else is wearing. She doesn’t realize it, but it seems that the 70s styles are coming back!)

I didn’t follow the pattern as written. I omitted some rows to shorten the sleeves. It seems that the pattern was designed for someone with much longer arms. I have what I call “gator arms”… much shorter than the average. Fortunately, the pattern lends itself to that sort of modification.

One thing that bugged me about this pattern was that the designer assumed that everyone who purchased the pattern would either have a color printer or would have the pattern up on a monitor. The labels for each of the rows was listed according to the color, and the label was in the color that was supposed to be used. In most cases, this wasn’t a big deal, but it was a real PITB for the lighter colored rows. On my black and white printer, those lighter colored labels were almost white.

And now for my little rant…

I like supporting new pattern designers. I’ve been known to purchase a slightly better pattern from an independent designer even though I have a very similar pattern in a book or magazine. I appreciate the spirit of innovation and admire their craftiness.

But it makes me absolutely nutty when I pay for a pattern, and it’s riddled with bugs or poorly written. It makes me even nuttier when a pattern maker could make the pattern more clear with a picture or diagram but don’t.

Digital cameras are cheap. You don’t need to be Margaret Bourke-White to capture an image that will make the pattern more clear. Current tools make it easy to insert images into text documents. So why not use them as much as possible?

Judicious use of images would have improved this pattern 150%. The pattern used a wide variety of stitch combinations, and there were so many cases when I didn’t know if I was doing a stitch right. If there had been a picture of what the pattern should look like, it would have saved me quite a few hours on the project. (In one case, I ripped back three rows after figuring out that what I thought that I had been instructed to do just didn’t work out.) For those of us who are crochet infrequently, this would be a lifesaver.

I paid $7.50 for this pattern via electronic download. It was a fun, but it was also frustrating. I’ve paid much less for better patterns. That’s almost the price of a book! Frankly, I’m more than a wee bit disappointed.

Tomorrow (or the next day), I’ll fill you in on the projects that have captured my attention since I finished the sleeves.

I have to remember that it’s been years since I have crocheted anything, and I think that the pattern was written by a Brit. So there may be some language and experience issues here.

But I swear… I’ve had more troubles with this than I thought that I would. I’ll explain these issues after I finish. For now, I’ll just say that I spent most of the past two days working rows, ripping them out, and then re-doing them.  (I’m still not sure that they’re right, but at least the stich counts worked out!)

My progress has likely also been slowed by my allergies, which are causing my eyes to burn like I’ve been peeling onions non-stop for weeks. By the end of the day, my eyes are so sore that I can’t even see anything. I’m not sure what I’m allergic to, but I wish it would just die already.

And now, when I’m reaching the end, I think that I’m losing my mind!

Before I started, I made doubly sure that I had enough materials. I started with a dozen skeins of Rowan Handknit Cotton that I’d bought on sale. I bought a handful more skeins in some of the colors that I already had to make sure that I had enough for the colors that were used frequently in the pattern. I then sat down with the pattern and put the color numbers next to the rows, again in the attempt to keep from running short of any color.

I know that I started with two skeins of the yellow. (Rowan calls it “Butter” but I call it “Wow! That’s YELLOW!”) I’m fairly sure that I’ve only used one skein; however, I now can’t find one of the skeins OR the label that would have gone on the skein had I used it.
I’ve ripped apart the couch. Moved everything in the living room. Looked around the house. And I can’t find it. This after I spent the last 45 minutes (with some minutes here and there spent watching my recording of “The Dead Zone”) working on a cross treble row that starts the flouncing at the end.

*sigh*

I have enough other colors that I think I can sub some other color in there, but it means ripping out the row that I just completed.

I am not happy.

I hated learning to crochet because I learned during a time when my three older brothers were playing and being kids.  I was learning everything that a woman in 1940 was expected to know to be a wife and mother.  Problem was, I was only eight years old and 1940 had passed long, long before.

I hated knitting for the same reason, but even more so because my mother absolutely loathed knitting and knew very little about it.  Her only solution for solving any problem was ripping back to the beginning and starting over.  It was far from fun.

I stopped doing both as soon as I possibly could, but when I found out that I was expecting my daughter, I started to crochet again.  I made a bunch of afghans and beautiful, beautiful things for her and her room.  Then I stopped again.  I haven’t picked up a crochet hook in over 13 years.

So why would I want to now?

I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter series, as is my daughter.  I made my daughter a Hermione Granger costume a few years ago, complete with knitted scarf, Gryffindor robe, wand, etc.  With her crazy, curly hair, she’s a perfect Hermione.   She wears the costume to every Harry Potter book launching she can (which makes me enormously glad that I thought to make her robe in a larger than needed size at the time!).  Since this is the last book, we thought it would be fun for me to dress up as Molly Weasley.

So here I am… crocheting Weasley Sleeves at the last moment (almost).

Fortunately, I had a bag of Rowan Handknit Cotton in a variety of colors that I had snagged for a song at an online sale.  I only needed a few more balls to have enough materials.  (So this is going to double as a stash-busting project!)  The colors aren’t a perfect match of the sleeves that Molly wore in the Chamber of Secrets movie, but it will be good enough… if I can finish on time.

I started on it tonight.  Since one of the colors that I ordered to finish the project was needed for the upper part of the sleeve, I started on the lower part.   I only put about an hour or so into it so far and have two rows done on each of the sleeves, and another row done on one of them.  We’ll see how fast it goes!