When it comes to setting crochet expectations, I tend to be more optimistic than I have reason to be. With startling regularity my non-crochet life intrudes on my crochet life and upends the work schedule I have devised, and the past two days have been no exception.

Yesterday I carefully read over the pattern I am writing, checking to make sure that I have accurately written when to change a color or increase or decrease stitches, and the truth is I find this part of crochet design a bit tedious.

But tedious or not, the only way to disseminate the information is to write the pattern, and while I try to follow pattern writing conventions, I also know that when I start a new project, I want to get going, and I seldom, if ever, read the pattern in it’s entirety before I begin. The result is that my eyes sometimes glide right over important information, and I find myself having to frog and rework parts of a project

So that is why I sometimes stray from the conventions and try to write the patterns the way I would want them written so that a person like me would make fewer errors.

Having spent a more time than I wanted to yesterday working on the details of the written pattern, today I focused more on the finishing details of the project. I had gotten this far with the second crochet pig — the one that was necessitated by the fact that I had not written comprehensive notes when I crocheted the first pig:

The head and body were almost done; the ears and the arms and the legs and the nose were done — seriously, I thought, how much longer could this take? As it turns out, it will take at least another day.

One of the things I did differently with this pig was that I used what is known in the world of crochet as a “jogless join,” but it would be more accurate to call it a “jog less join”:

because as can be seen, the jog does not disappear, it is just less abrupt:

and while the technique certainly has its place and appropriate uses, I don’t know that I like it any better in this instance. However at this point, I am not about to do it over.

But the devil, they say, is in the details, and it turns out that there were more details than I recalled from the first pig, so when the day began to draw to a close and my dog, Clooney, was agitating for his walk, I had only gotten this far:

I am hoping that when I get up tomorrow, I am refreshed, and that when I set myself the next set of great crochet expectations, I am able to meet them.