Almost 3-4 months ago on my Facebook feed I saw a post about a scarf that is created using technique called planned pooling. At first I thought how hard it would be.. I just have to follow what people have mentioned. Start with 22 chains and it will turn up as expected. But soon I realized that it wasn't that simple. I did few more attempts without putting much thought into it and result was awful. The pattern wont be consistent or wont turn out the way it was suppose to at all. At that point I conveniently blamed yarn for all the mistakes and misfortune. ) So I gave up on the blue yarn that I was working on and started with this zebra yarn.. Just after couple more failed attempts I realized this is not something I can blindly follow. So I viewed multiple videos, read few articles. That's when the concept became clear to me and I finally understood what people meant by adjusting tension and needles for he work in all those Facebook post comments. Though I was reading so much, it still felt like something that isn't quite clear to me.. So finally I decided to take help of my neighborhood friend Excel for clearing out my thoughts and plotting what needs to happen to get this pattern.
I chained through the complete color sequence and then started working on the moss stitch. (one chain and one single crochet). I completed that for complete color sequence. (you will not get through all the chains because yarn for 2 chains < yarn for 1 chain + 1 single crochet).
At this point I noted that I am getting the sequence as: 11 Black 2 Grey 6 White 2 Grey. So if I include grey as white I would have 11 Black and 10 White. Which is perfect because now if I used the row of 11 Moss stitch a row, every alternate row the sequence will need 1 stitch from the next sequence so that the colors of the stitch slide. (Because if I had 10White and 10 Black or 11 White and 11 Black the colors will stack up and make every alternate row white and black to get the stripes which was not what I was intending)
So now after getting this information I removed the white stitches that I had already done and made them on the next row. And continued the moss stitch remembering to get exactly 11 blacks and 10 whites every time. If I was not getting enough (say only 10 stitches of black+ 1 chain), I removed the few stitches of black and made them little tighter to get exactly 11 blacks. Similarly if I still had some yarn left after consuming the color sequence, I removed the few stitches and made them little loose. I tried to do the chains loose or tight rather than the single crochet part which helped maintain the look. Note that in the grand scheme these loose and tight don't appear at all but if you missed the number of stitches in the color, it will show up as then the colors wont shift as required.
Another thing I had to was to attatch the second ball of yarn correctly. When I was almost near end of first ball, I left out the whole color sequence on the yarn and matched that with the color sequence in the second ball. Using that intersection as single yarn while crocheting, I was able to continue correctly into my next sequence in the second yarn.
In the end after completing, I just weaved in the ends of the first and second ball near the intersection so that the colors disappear in the stitches. Also I undid the first extra chains (from the initial chain through the color sequence) and weaved that end and the final end as well ensuring the colors were matching.
I didn't keep track of number of rows for the scarf, just wrapped it around my neck to get the feel of where to end. The only thing I did was to complete the whole triangle to match how I had started in the first place.
I also made 2 scarf like but shorter (1 triangle of black, 1 white triangle and 1 black triangle to the side) rectangles and then stitched them together length wise. I then closed their edges by joining them together to get cylinder. Now I just weaved through the top portion to gather it and close it making it cone shape. I attached one pom pom to this end and folded the other end to make the cap.
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