Argyle gone wrong!

I've been working on my argyle crochet book.  It looks like it's going to be about a dozen (all new!) patterns.  Yay! 

As an author, I feel like I need all of my books to be as close to perfect as I can make them, but as a blogger, I feel like I need to share all of my experiments, even the ones that fail.  Lucky for me, I've got the opportunity to share all the failures here, and still can be a perfect "expert" in the books.  Best of both worlds!

I have been working on a baby blanket.  I wanted to do a big center piece of argyle, and then put a solid color border around the outside, and maybe run a fat satin ribbon through the edging.  Totes adorable, right?!  I was so excited when my practice swatch turned out so sweet.

But once I got going on the large piece, 3 times the size of my swatch, I quickly lost control of the stripes.  If you look, you'll see that they wobble and get wonky after one repeat of the pattern.  Ugh.  This is a small section of the piece (I cropped it down for the picture) that I spent 3 days working on...

It's pretty awful.  I had to hide it away for a few days so I wouldn't have to look at it while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with it.  I've finally decided to frog the whole thing, and do the blanket in patches, which will still look cute, and the argyle will stay precise (which is the whole point of it).

I think I've finally figured out how I went hideously wrong with this piece.  First off, it's a baby yarn, which means it's a narrower yarn and has shorter lengths for each color (as opposed to worsted weight yarn), which makes it harder to control period.  And I used a size g hook, instead of a size d hook (or other smaller sized hook), which added to the difficulty since it made the short color lengths even harder to control.

I will never say that I'm happy that this thing turned out so terrible, but I'm glad that I now know the outer limits of what's possible with this technique.  Ultimately, it's going to make a better book, and hopefully it will save all of you from spending 3 days of single crochet that you have to frog!  LOL!!!

Okay, so I've got to get ready for my sister's baby shower, so I'm going to go now.  I hope you all have a wonderful, magical weekend, filled with at least two unexpectedly delightful surprises!

xoxo