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 This week I tested a crochet pattern by a fellow designer on Ravelry.
The Minion Banana Cozy was definitely outside my crochet comfort zone: It had short rows, a tight gauge, small parts. But he was so darn cute.
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 One of the testers of my new pattern mentioned that he wished he'd started his hat with a Magic Loop: the starting chain-ring was too loose.
I suggested to dgou -- his name on Ravelry -- that he use the yarn tail to weave through the stitches in the first round, and then pull it tight. It would create an After-the-Fact Magic Loop. He liked the idea and even coined a new name for it: The Retroactive Magic Loop. (Thanks, dgou!) I almost always finish off my hats with a Retroactive Magic Loop. So easy. More photos are here. I asked my sister, an artist, what she thought of the cover-page photo of my new pattern.
"It's OK," she said, clearly underwhelmed. "What's wrong with it?" "That hat has a giant splotch in the center. It's really distracting." Compared with the retake, I prefer the splotch photo. It shows the stitches more clearly, and the lighting's better. But sometimes you have to listen to your sister, who knows a thing or two about what's visually pleasing. And what isn't.  I've been conducting a test of a new pattern on Ravelry, and I discovered that there's no standardized name for half-double crochet's third loop. That's the one behind the usual V-loops at the top of the stitch.
 Sometimes I worry that my photo illustrations of stitches might be hard to read simply because yarn tends to be fuzzy. So I went to the kids' crafts department at Jo-Ann Fabrics yesterday, and I found some thin cording. It seemed to me that this plastic spaghetti would be more "legible" in a diagram. The cording had been cut into short-ish lengths, so each row of crochet took a separate piece. Here's the result being photographed:  For the photo, I taped the unruly plastic swatch to a sheet of paper. I turned the photo into a sketch in Picasa, where I also added the title and explanatory text. Then I used Paint to add the back-loop arrows. The finished diagram is at the top of this post. For comparison's sake, here's an earlier effort with yarn:   I take the photos for my Etsy shop and for my patterns in front of this window. I use a point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix camera, which I bought about five years ago.
Usually, the table is more cluttered than this, but it always has the comb on it -- a mannequin's wig gets messed up every time you take her hat off. (And sometimes the wig comes off, too.) Another fixture is the decorative box that a friend gave me. I use it to rest my elbows on when I shoot. And to store the comb.     In my Etsy shop, my stock of hats made from recycled yarn seems to keep dwindling. This is a good time of year -- the off-season for hats (except in places such as Australia, for instance) -- to make more.
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