1 – Have another beading needle. Have two or three more. By the end of the project your stainless-steel wire will be a stainless-steel pretzel.
2 – If the needle slips easily under the thread, you’re in the wrong row.
3 – The base row of ladder stitch will be finicky but relatively peaceful. The second rows that hang off the base row? Don’t start those tired. Just… don’t.
4 – It’s easier to go through beads than under thread. Especially when you shouldn’t.
5 – The lighting is never good enough.
6 – Delica beads allow multiple thread passes. You will be forced to abuse this.
7 – The tiny design will take as much effort and time as a double-drop design three times the size. At least.
8 – And after all that, no one’s going to believe it cost as much labor as something three times as big. Augh.
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
It’s a truism little acknowledged in crafts, yes.
I remember when I was starting out with a crafts project for some do-it-yourself presents. Figured, oh, this’ll take me a month. Month and a half tops.
One jump cut and more than a year later … yeah.
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Oof. Yeah. It always takes much, much longer than you think….
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That last one especially. It’s one of my standard warnings about blacksmithing and stained glass too: the part that looks the most complicated and difficult to make, is likely the easiest, and the part that looks the easiest to make is likely the most difficult.
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As the old saying goes, “It takes a lot of work, to make it look this easy.”
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Yep. 🙂
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*Nod!*
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I am having issues with the Miss Grace Shawl- Worsted Weight kit from SKEINO. The moron, Bjorn, who wrote the pattern, didn’t make it row-by-row or cell-by-cell or tell you that it’s on the first row of the garter stitch ridge that you knit through the front and then the back at the end of the row. It is crucial that you do this on the first one because otherwise, you will have a stretch of unknitted yarn going from the end of the last row of Segment A to the beginning stitch of the first half form. I would have been lost without the VeryPink Knits tutorial for the earlier version, the Miss Grace Shawl. Neither my mother, an experienced knitter who is helping me with this and who hasn’t had time to knit since the 1990s, nor I had EVER seen swing knitting, which has apparently been a thing in Germany, where SKEINO is based, for a while. To give an idea of bad that was for my ability to make the shawl, my mother learned everything she had ever known about knitting in America, where she didn’t watch a single knitting video from YouTube until I got interested in knitting again. I had to show HER combined continental knitting, that thing where you slip the first stitch knitwise onto the other needle instead of knitting through it, and that M1 was one way of writing increases.
To make matters worse, when SKEINO adapted the pattern for the Miss Grace Shawl into Miss Grace Shawl-Worsted Weight, they took off too much pattern because they were trying to account for the difference in thickness between worsted weight and the original fingering, which is lighter.
As a result, I am having to just make up the rest of the pattern using a notepad and pattern recognition abilities to use up the rest of the yarn.
Ugh.
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Ouch! And they never listen when you try and contact the pattern maker to tell them their directions are as clear as mud. Right now I’m finishing up the hood for a baby hoodie and I’m praying the pattern actually turns out, even though I’m using a variegated yarn instead of the various stripes.
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I once endeavored to make my dad a crochet Star Wars quilt for Christmas. I started in early fall, didn’t finish until halfway through the next year, and I’m still dealing with the stray threads from many of the more complicated colorwork squares deciding to come loose. (Plus there’s a part early into the granny-square style border where a thread decided to fray apart and I really don’t want to have to rip the entire border apart just to fix it.)
Sometimes I honestly wish I had just knitted the intarsia patterns instead. Would have used less yarn, the end product would have looked a lot cleaner, and I could have used a solid (or maybe even Star Wars patterned) cloth back to hide all the ends and stuffed the quilt with batting or something.
I’m still proud of my disaster of a quilt though. Even when my creations come out pretty… questionable (weird sizing, bad yarn texture (acrylic, yuck), something meant to be knitted with bulky yarn done in worsted instead (that’s actually one of the projects I’m most proud of, it was a Tree of Life bag with a lot of tricky cabling)), it’s not like I’m going to throw them away, or even tear them apart (most of the time) in order to re-use the yarn. Instead, often they just sit in my yarn basket, completely ignored until I decide to see what I have in the way of materials for a new project.
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There’s something to be said from being stubborn and learning how NOT to do something. 😉
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I totally agree!! My mother is an amazing painter and it takes more than one of us to convince her that she needs to charge more for her paintings, especially because of how much work she puts into them. And then people dont want to pay the very legitimate cost. I love good old Crewel embroidery, and I have a similar mental list whenever I’m working on a project. I didn’t even realize that I’m following some of those unspoken rules until this summer when my sister was visiting from Japan. She is talented in counted cross stitch (which I still can’t master to my personal shame) and she asked me about why I keep a spare needle in my fabric or pull the thread on each side in an odd way. (keeps it from tying itself into knots, no joke) It is kind of fun to see all the ways people create and they to thwart Murphy. It also makes me sad that people dont want to pay the price for the hard work and actual experience that go into making and creating. I value your jewelry all the more, knowing how hard you work to create it!! One of these days I will have enough to buy some… I guess I have never understood why people think that handmade crafts are overpriced, even before I started doing crafts of my own. Sorry for rambling, you are amazing!
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Thanks! 🙂 Hopefully the spiderweb earrings (will have pics in a couple days) will interest someone….
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