Tips For If You Hate Long Increasing Or Decreasing

I don’t know if you can tell by my patterns if you’ve ever seen any of my patterns, but I hate the long increase and decreases in most patterns. With my ADHD I have a hard time focusing on certain aspects of things. One of my favorite things about crocheting is the repetition. The main thing that I love doing is being able to make my pattern anywhere I go. So all of my patterns are very simple and easy and I look for patterns to either try or configure into what I like, look for simplicity. But if you’ve ever tried to make any sort of stuffed animal or something that needs to be stuffed, you’ll know that most of the time it requires a slow increase or decrease. What I mean by slow is that it is one increase every 20 stitches and then the next row is one increased every 19 stitches or something random like that. To make it extend longer but also go short and I understand the concept of that but I don’t like personally doing it. Something I can’t remember of the top of my head and I love to remember my patterns. I also hate sitting in front of a screen and reading a pattern for the entire pattern, when I do find patterns that I want to try or like I normally remember certain amounts of stitches and then try and do it myself. Pretty much normally when I try new patterns I just look for portions and amounts of rows and such. This is just my preferred way of doing things, that being said I come up with a few ways around this to make it easier for myself. If you want copy an exact pattern or want your project to look exactly the same as someone else’s this might not be the tip for you. This is a replacement but it is not correlated with other patterns. It does take some finessing when putting these tips into a pattern so it is not a 100% fill in fix for any pattern you find. It is just some things I have learned along the way of crocheting when I hate long increases and decreases. So All of these are pattern-based, even though technically the others are a pattern they are not a pattern that I like to wrap my head around.

First tip

We are making the beginning of a ball of some kind, look for the biggest amount of stitches. This is the number that is repeated a handful of times before you start decreasing. Depending on the size of the pattern, what I do is divide that number in half, and when I make the magic circles I put that half number in and increase all of my stitches once. This does not work with big patterns. This is for things like gloves, socks, small to medium stuffed animal heads. Then after you get your main number, you’ll just go around normally and eventually, it will even out and have just a sharp beginning instead of an elongated beginning. I do the same things with decreases where I try and do all of them in one row rather than slowly doing them to get to a number

Tip two

Another way to do decreases if you’re trying for a long spout, large to a small cone shape, what I like to do is decrease the first, and technically second, stitch in each row, and then the rest are regular. It is not super long like you can make with the other way but it does give you that cone shape for if you want to make a worm, a Carrots, a heart butt, etc.

If you want a little more information I would suggest looking at my patterns that require increasing or decreasing and see what I mean by looking at the pattern itself, I feel like it might be better explained in context.