“Measure once and cut twice” was the ironic warning that the professor gave to my daughter’s sculpture class and that saying makes me smile when I think about my long history of crocheting errors. Luckily, with crochet, nothing is permanently ruined, except maybe my ego, and it’s fairly easy to rip out incorrect stitches and start over. As you may have guessed, that saying came to mind because the first version of The Daisy Pillow had a whopper of an error.

I designed The Daisy Pillow using the online program Stitch Fiddle. In case you aren’t familiar with it, Stitch Fiddle is an extremely useful online design tool that can be used for developing crochet, knit, cross stitch, and quilt patterns to name a few. And, in case you were wondering, I am receiving no compensation whatsoever from Stitch Fiddle for writing this post.

According to the website, Stitch Fiddle was founded by Sander de Bruijne and is based in The Netherlands. The site boasts that 800,000 crafters have joined and that one new chart is added every minute. The best part about Stitch Fiddle is that you can try it for free to see if it will be a useful tool for your design process. That said, if you do end up using it to create a pattern, you will need to pay to upgrade to the premium version to download your graph and instructions.

As you might’ve guessed by the DaisyGardenCrochet name, I am obsessed with daisies, and I’ve always wanted to design my own daisy pattern. Many of the daisy crochet graphgan designs that I’ve seen online have petals that don’t look rounded enough for my taste, so I set out to create my own.

The first and most crucial step in making a Stitch Fiddle pattern is to crochet up a gauge swatch using your chosen yarn and hook. This step is critical because you will need to input the number of stitches and rows per inch into the program in order to accurately match the graph to the size of the finished project. How do I know that, you ask? Well, I learned it the hard way, of course!

After making the gauge swatch for The Daisy Pillow, I miscounted the number of rows per inch by half. Yes, by half. I still can’t figure out how I messed that one up so badly. Anyway, by the time that I was a third of the way through the project, I wondered why the daisy looked like a skinny, stretched, fun house mirror flower. A quick re-check of my gauge swatch gave me the answer. My cheeks are turning red just thinking about that moment.

So, remember to always count twice and crochet once, or just let me do all of the work and download the fully corrected Daisy Pillow Pattern on Ravelry.

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