WIP: Purple Haze

I might have thrown Purple Haze from Crochet Me in the UFO or Frog pile but for 2 reasons - 1. I love the look of the sweater too much to give up and (here's the big reason) 2. Lauren Irving (the designer) has practically held my hand while I slowly stepped OUT of my comfort box and tried something new. In the end, there is progress to report, although most of it, so far, is in my level of understanding of the pattern.

This was the third sweater I began during my sweater weekend at the beginning of the month. I'm making this one for me, using Gedifra 'Cotton Merino'. Unlike the other two sweaters, this one has gone more slowly as I struggled to understand the pattern. Now if I were one to just crochet a pattern, follow the directions and hope it works out in the end, I would probably be wearing Purple Haze right now. My passion for understanding a pattern before I make it, for having a vision of how it's going to look, and for practically memorizing the schematics usually saves me hours of heartache. I can catch the errors, see how the pattern needs to be modified to fit my body and make changes without excessive cycles of hooking and frogging. I have, on rare occasion, been able to blindly follow a pattern when I don't know the outcome exactly. This requires knowing and trusting the designer. I can do this when testing for Robyn, like on secret project 2, when even she wasn't sure how exactly it was going to turn out. (Actually I'm sure she did in her head, just not on paper.) In the future, I'll be able to do this with Lauren. Her e-mails have been insightful helping me to understand her "out of the box" approach to this sweater. It's funny, usually by the time I finished writing my e-mail to her asking questions, I had furthered my understanding so much that I would end each e-mail, with "I think I get it now". She would begin each e-mail "Yes, you get it". I'm waiting on one final e-mail back from Lauren and then I think I'm good to go. I'm going to frog back this a bit, I made the armhole too long (gauge problem) and then I think I'll be off to the races! Thank you to Lauren for answering e-mails, to Kim for creating (and re-creating) Crochet Me and to Jess & Casey for sharing their brilliant idea known as Ravelry with the world. (I first contacted Lauren through her Purple Haze project page on Ravelry.)

I will make this sweater....