Recently I was working on a project for a future issue of Crochet World. It was to be a set of super simple crocheted squares. I had what I wanted to do in mind. I made the small square and it seemed off. I thought “hmmm, that will probably block out square.” And so I moved on to the next larger one. Eek, it had the same issue but was even worse. They looked like parallelograms; not squares.

What was happening? I had no clue but I knew it wouldn’t block out. So I did some research online and finally found out what the problem was.

Think about when you crochet. Your finished stitch slopes one direction or the other depending upon if you are right handed or left handed. When you turn your work it slopes the opposite direction. In my brain, I wanted a row of sc followed by a row of dc and I wanted to alter this throughout to keep it simple. Since the taller stitches all happened on the same row at the same interval, the slope of those stitches was more prominent and therefore the piece wanted to slope in that direction. Ahhhhhh….light bulb.

So ultimately I didn’t go with the above design since I truly did want a square. I needed something that either used the taller stitches on the wrong side of the work as well or I needed to stick with stitches closer to the same height throughout. Since it took me some digging to find the solution, I figured you all would appreciate this little tidbit of information as well.

—Britt Schmiesing, editor