The other night in a crochet chat room someone asked me if I held my hook in a pencil grip or a knife grip. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Well, pick up a crochet hook and look,” she said; “I am really curious.” So I picked up a crochet hook (because there is always one nearby, right?) and made a stitch or two. And I still didn’t know which kind of gripper I am. If I tried to hold a pencil or a knife the same way that I hold my crochet hook, I would neither be able to write longhand nor eat. So I pretended I didn’t see her question and signed off shortly thereafter. There is an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants in which SpongeBob tries to analyze how he ties his shoes, and gets so befuddled that he can’t do it anymore. I do not want to forget how to crochet.
I know that I crochet oddly. I know this because I have watched a million other crocheters ply their needles and they never do it the same way I do it. Periodically, I think I should learn to crochet “correctly” and I will frustrate myself for a few hours trying and then I give up and do it the way I always have. I end up with results that please me, are recognizable as crochet stitches, have a nice even gauge that only comes from thousands of stitches of practice, and so I get over worrying about my odd process. It is what it is.
I take a similar, laissez-faire approach to following patterns. I try, I really do try, to be obsessive and follow every little note and every little detail, but sometimes I can’t quite catch what the designer wanted me to do, so I punt. I look at the photo, I look at what I am doing, I have the general gist in my head of what comes next, and so I just do what I think needs done. Is mine going to look exactly like the photo? Maybe not. But it will do what it needs to do, it will be done, and done is good.
Sometimes my crocheted items come out not looking at all like the model in the photo—not because I deliberately chose to flout the instructions, but because maybe I was not paying quite enough attention. I have a wonderful way of rationalizing these kind of outcomes, too. I do not make mistakes—I make design modifications. I modify the pattern to get the results I want. Or at least that’s what I pretend I do. In actuality, my criterion for frogging the heck out of something is pretty simple. Is whatever boneheaded thing I did symmetrical, and therefore it looks like it was on purpose, even if it wasn’t? Yes? It’s a design modification and it stays in.
When I taught drama, I used to tell my students that if they forgot their lines they should just say something that furthered the scene along. “After all,” I told them, “the audience isn’t following along in the script.” I feel the same way about patterns. As long as someone is not coming at me with a pattern in her hands to do a line-by-line comparison between my garment and the text, then it’s all good. I will get to the finish line eventually and with most of the plot intact, and 99.9 percent of people looking on won’t know the difference.