Improving Printed Patterns

There's something about snowflake patterns that inspires me to embellish them, even when I sit down intending to follow the pattern exactly as printed. It started with frustration at certain flakes that wanted to cup or ripple, which taught me that it's not so hard to figure out what it takes to make a snowflake lie flat. When I leared how easy it was to crochet with beads, the first thing I did was to upgrade my favorite snowflake patterns with beaded picots, and soon I was adding beads wherever I could, and changing patterns to make room for more. As my collection of snowflake patterns grew and I perused them more often, I got tired of all those same-old loopies, and started changing them into shells and picots, or covering them with sc. When I got tired of plain old shells, I upgraded them to more interesting shapes with combos of dc and trc. Now I find myself casually giving heart transplants to flakes with interesting arms but boring middles, or inventing embellished arms for interesting centers.

Modeling From Real Snowflakes

For a real challenge, I get out my copy of Bentley's Snow Crystals, choose a pretty snowflake photo, and do my best to reproduce it in crochet. Snow Crystals is a Dover book that's mostly just pages and pages of magnified photographs of actual snowflakes, taken 70+ years ago by this mad genius up in Vermont (truly, no offense meant, I adore mad geniuses... and you may have noted that I'm a bit whacked myself). If you groove on symmetries of snowflakes, this book is a must-have item.

Want to Play Snowflakes Together?

Lately I've been thinking that it would be fun to make a mailinglist where we could talk about our snowflakes, how we embellish them, strategies for pattern "improvement", and share the patterns that we come up with. I wouldn't expect this to be a very high-traffic mailinglist (except possibly at holiday time), but I would love to share tips and patterns with other snowflake designers. I've made the group at egroups, so you can click to find out more.

Write to me at noelvn@teleport.com with suggestions, complaints, links, patterns, reviews, etc.
© Copyright 1997, 2000 Noël V. Nevins