I’ve had this idea to crochet pattern blocks since last spring. I bought the yarn back in May of last year, but I had a hard time getting started on it. Part of the issue is me wanting everything to be perfect. I wanted to knit all the shapes in the round, but some of the shapes were tricky. There was also the issue of figuring out how to get all the edges to be the same length. I couldn’t figure it out on paper, so I put it off.
I finally started yesterday and it turned out to be much easier than I expected. I started with the hexagon, figuring it’d be similar to making a circle but I’d put all the increases in the same place on purpose. I used treble stitches in the corners and worked increases in the same stitch. It worked out nicely. I tried the square next since I knew how to make a granny square. I just needed to replace the chain stitches with double crochet stitches so there wouldn’t be gaps. I used treble stitches again in the corners and it worked well. Two down, four to go!
The other shapes were the ones that stumped me though. I wanted to make them in the round, but I decided they may be easier worked flat. Once I accepted that, it turns out they’re easy to make. A trapezoid is half a hexagon. It took me a few tries to get the shape just right. I ended up adding a stitch to make it an odd number. At first, I tried treble crochet stitches on the ends, but it ended up being too long, so I redid it with double crochet stitches.
Next, a triangle is a third of a trapezoid. I thought about using treble crochet stitches for the edge stitches, but in the end, I stuck with double crochet and it worked out nicely. A rhombus is two triangles, so I made another triangle and then I worked the same number of rows with decreases. I had trouble figuring out the decrease rows, but when the last row was decreased to one stitch, everything fell into place.
The narrow rhombus was the final piece. Initially, I thought about working it lengthwise, but I couldn’t figure out how to work the increases. After a break, I realized that that the narrow rhombus is basically half of the other rhombus. I could work it in a similar way, but with increases on just one side. Same for the decreases, but on the opposite edge. And it worked!
UPDATE: About that narrow rhombus. I wasn’t happy with it, so I played around some more. Ended up alternating the edge that the increases and decreases were. They look more symmetrical now.
While working these shapes, I started thinking about how I could make them bigger. If I add a round to the square, I would have to add two rounds to the hexagon in order to keep the edges the same length. That means adding two rows to the trapezoid and the triangle and four rows to the rhombuses. I created an Excel sheet to keep track of all the sizes. And then, I ended up calculating how much yarn each size would use. This took a while. I made a sample piece to figure out how much yarn each stitch uses (both double and treble), then I played around with the numbers to figure out how many stitches each size would have (broken down to double and treble). I haven’t done this much math in a long time, but I think I finally got it now. I’ll work some sample shapes and double check them by weighing them.
Stay tuned for the pattern!
Kun Yin Knits 