I’ve been going crazy looking for missing patterns the last 2 or 3 weeks. One pattern, the Biennial elephant rug, actually went missing about 2 months ago. With it was all my work and computations about the different colors of nylon loops I would need. While I’ve soldiered on without it, hopeful it would show up, on Wednesday, I was at the point where I either needed to find it or create all new patterns and computations. The other two patterns were things that clients have wanted which I couldn’t find. One for a while and one for a couple of weeks. Fortunately, I’ve not had enough steam to do much with those patterns even if I found them but, enough is enough and it was time to find or redo all three patterns.
I started by going over, while standing on a ladder, all the patterns rolled up in my storage shelves … to no avail. Then, I went through the three 5 gallon buckets I keep for patterns I use all the time. Two of the missing patterns should have been in them. I must have sorted through all three buckets at least 5 or 6 times with no success. That left me with only one option –
Going through the rolls one by one which means I had to take each one out, look it over and set it somewhere else.
That takes a bit of time to do so. Fortunately, I found one errant pattern during that process. It was small, stowed in an odd spot and pushed all the way back where it got covered up with other bigger patterns.
The more I pulled them out
The more I sorted them. That’s partly for organizational reasons, when I am ready to put them back and for editing purposes. For example, some designs have 8 or 10 rolls covering different kinds of patterns for that design. Big Momma has a 6.5’ rug, a medium 4+foot rug, various table runners, pillows and other odd configurations that some people have asked for over the years. A couple of designs have 2 or more finished versions … probably because I couldn’t find that pattern once and had to make another, so now have 2. Several geometrics have patterns for 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 and 24 inch blocks, plus other over large sizes. Then, there are all sorts of odd ball chair seat patterns, odd patterns I made once for a client and other things I’ve kept. Hopefully, with everything out and sorted, I can condense many of these patterns into one or two bundles for each design and to save space.
I did find a couple of blasts from the pasts.
My favorite find was for Gene’s Birds, my 3rd rug, which I made at my first CPRC (1999) and then sold. All these parakeets were my actual birds – many having been raised from breeding pairs I also raised.
I did not know I had this pattern any more. It’s rather fragile, being on newsprint paper. If you can see all the writing it’s because I sent this pattern to my Cambria teacher, Jackye Hansen, before class. She returned it to me with all her hooking suggestions neatly written all over it.
Of special note was the thin piece of netting rolled up in the pattern. This is how I transferred my original pattern to monk’s cloth. I covered the paper pattern with the netting, then traced the design onto the netting. Once done, I placed the netting on my monk’s cloth and retraced the design through the netting. I also found a bundle for Good Queen Bess, another early (and still unfinished rug) that I also prepped in the same way for a class with Elizabeth Black after I moved to Anaheim.
Happily, another find was the stack of Biennial elephant project info stashed into and hidden by several rolls. That left me with one missing pattern.
After going through all the rolls taken off the shelves, I went through, again, all three buckets of patterns until,
I found the last pattern right in bucket 3 where it was supposed to have been all along. I have no idea how this happened.
All the rolls will go back into the storage area, hopefully in edited and organized fashion with the next few days.
Now, the other thing I can’t remember is
Who wanted Elizabeth Black’s Tiger? If you did, please let me know.