Grand Bazaar – Before We Begin: Pattern Reading

Today, a member in the Polly Plum Pattern Posse commented that she is planning on stepping out of her comfort zone to make A Day at the Grand Bazaar. That is simply the most wonderful thing I could hear! You see, I love my own comfort zone. Too much. And even though I love it, I know better than to stay too long. I know the amazing things I dream of doing won’t happen within my comfort zone, and from the very first day I toyed with the idea of designing my own crochet patterns, I dreamed of helping crocheters step out of their crochet-comfort zones to see that they are capable of making amazing things with yarn and a hook.

If you own the pattern for A Day at the Grand Bazaar, you’ll see I’ve written it with this in mind. The second and third pages cover items you’ll want to know before you begin. I wanted to take the surprise and scariness out of starting a pattern without fully knowing what you’re getting yourself into. This is not an easy pattern. It’s also not a terribly difficult pattern. There are bits of advanced crocheting and bits of easy crocheting, but most of it floats right around intermediate. So, what we’re going to do over the next several days before the CAL Lite begins is go over all of these items and techniques to make sure we’re comfortable with them.

Don’t worry! Most of the advanced techniques I used have easier alternatives. For example, I use an invisible join for many of the rounds. However, you do NOT have to use an invisible join – just join your round the way you always do. But, if you want to learn how to invisible join we’ll be going over that before the CAL Lite begins.

Before you Begin: Brackets & Repeats

Today, we’re going to look at the first two items in the “Before you Begin” section of the pattern. Those are brackets and repeats. These are two pretty simple things to cover, but really, the matter at hand is pattern reading. Therefore, I’ve published a new page here on Every Trick on the Hook that covers the pattern conventions I use when I write. This will be an ever-growing, ever-updated resource for ALL Polly Plum patterns. I recommend you take a peek, you don’t have to read the whole thing, and acquaint yourself with it and reference it as needed. (If you need to navigate back to the page later, it can be found under the “Patterns” menu on the menu bar.)

The brackets used in ADatGB are pretty standard, but the repeats are not. I cannot emphasize enough that you should read the repeats carefully. Make sure you work everything within the repeat symbols and nothing more, and make sure when you are done working the repeat that you go back the part of the pattern that instructed the repeat and continue with the instructions immediately after it. If you need to, grab a piece of notebook paper and write out the pattern and repeats in a way that makes sense to you.

The next few items we’ll work on will be more exciting (promise!) and involve video and photo tutorial types of things.

Until then…

Crochet on, crochet strong!