Cats, Baskets, and Quilts [Part 2]

So I finished part one of this trio back on June 9th, 2006. The project went into a basket, from there a box, from there one of those paper protector sleeves and a folder, and finally hidden away in my closet until rediscovery a few months ago. And it's really no wonder why I stashed it away to forget about it...

Whilst the end pieces are really, genuinely, to my liking, the patterns themselves are done in the "old style" (because I don't know a better way to call it) where the entire thing is done in black and white. Normally this isn't a problem for patterns, honestly! But the way this is charted out many of the symbols are very similar and the backstitching is all done in thick black lines that is difficult to tell apart from the actual grid. For example, see this image here for the symbol annoyance: scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v…

My eyes were fatigued pretty quickly trying to do the basket's weaving, reading through the blocky symbols and the ridiculous backstitching methods. I gave up trying to read it and set it aside for another month, and stared at it as I walked by. "Will it be another decade before I finish that thing?"

I decided that instead of giving in to the pains of ye olden pattern style that I'd just recreate the pattern digitally and assign sensible, readable symbols myself, and so I did! Converting paper patterns into digital patterns is surprisingly relaxing and once it was all put onto my screen and I could, you know, highlight what it was I was working with instead of blindly trying to figure out which black rectangle went where I became a lot more motivated to finish it.

Another thing entirely wrong with these patterns, besides some of the obvious misprints (one of the pinks was labeled blue, for instance) or missing pattern parts (one of the quilt squares had an entire blank stripe going through it) there wereeeee inconsistencies between the pattern itself and the final product preview on the kit's cover page. For example, you can see pretty clearly on the cat's head that there's partial stitches that leave white spaces open. On the preview image, those white spaces are filled in. The other glaring example for me you won't see until Part 3 and that a center quilt square with an extra outline - the pattern makes no note of it. Smaller things like Part 1 and Part 3 declare the outer square stitching should be two strands, but for part 2 it's just one strand. Because all backstitching on the patterns is done in slightly-thicker-than-the-grid black it's a bit of a toss up where one color starts and another color ends, all around a difficult thing to work with.

Buttttttt anyway yeah the end stitching is really cute. If you can prove to me you own these patterns and would like the much-easier-to-read digital versions I made, feel free to drop me a line.

Color Total: 28
Size: 6 x 6 inches
Time: 43 hours _{(more or less, had to estimate from previous non-timer)}
14 Count white Aida
Part of a Janlynn kit.