Crocheted Beloved – a free stitch pattern
My friend Rebecca very kindly agreed to do an occasional swatch for the crochet stitch patterns I’d like to try. This month’s Patreon word is Beloved. I converted the letters to numbers and charted the numbers on a grid in a variety of ways.
This stitch pattern is available for personal use and published designs alike (I’d prefer being given credit). Do let me know if you use it; it makes me happy.
I also made a very different lace pattern for knitters, which I put in a separate post. It has a very different character, and I’m fine with that – it’s a result of how the encoding works with different crafts. If I’m making lace designs for knitting, the marked spaces are turned into increases which have to be counterbalanced by decreases. The decreases take work to place in an aesthetically pleasing way, and the end result can look very different from the beginning chart with just marked squares on it. (If you look at the knitting version, the code is encompassed by just the squares with little circles in them.)
I am not going to get the opportunity to explore and swatch with the more delicate versions of crochet lace; that’s just how it is. (I’d love to see a crochet designer figure out how to turn the numbers from encoding letters into that kind of lace!) But I can make simpler charts that are a straight-up translation of my grids into simple crochet.
This is the grid I worked with, which can be used for a variety of crafts:
I rotated this chart by 90 degrees and turned the resulting top half into a crochet chart. I turned every white space into a double crochet stitch and every black space into a chain stitch. I put a selvedge up each side, alternating turning chains and double crochets.
This chart needs a foundation that’s a multiple of 12, plus 2 stitches for the selvedge and then 3 chains for the turning chain. Repeat is shown between the two vertical red lines.
Rebecca worked two horizontal repeats of the pattern for me. I made the chart using crocharts.com (a huge help, though it’s still in beta) and then did some final editing in Inkscape.
There are of course any number of ways this could be used for crochet – filet crochet is an obvious choice. You could do a post stitch instead of a chain stitch, or work the original chart in colors in Tunisian crochet. The sky’s the limit!
Here is an example of how one might color the chart differently for use in beading or quilt piecing or cross stitch.
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