Interlocking Patches

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Website: interlockingpatches.com

Subscriptions: interlockingpatches.gumroad.com/l/VAULT

Pattern Collections: interlockingpatches.gumroad.com

Discord: discord.gg/Rz4d8nzy26

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Yikes! I'm so sorry that designer put you through all that! What a bizarre, counterproductive response to someone thoughtfully and creatively engaging with one's work! Work that they paid for! Work that they were actively trying to promote on one's behalf! Sheesh!

I enjoy crabbing, and I crab a little when people here tag my posts "embroidery" because I don't want people to think that's what the technique is in those photos. If someone wanted to actually embroider my motifs — or work them in Tunisian mosaic, or render them as stick-and-poke tattoos, or whatever! — they would not need my permission; I would be delighted, and I'd certainly want to see how it turned out.

I'm a visual artist by training and a conceptual artist by disposition, and I'm basically out here busking. I make "motifs" and PDFs that explain how I go about crocheting them, but the motifs themselves are just ideas—information, arrangements of lines. Once I've shared those ideas in any form they just… are, and anyone can make or do whatever they want with them! That's how ideas work!

I do love it when people crochet my patterns exactly as written. I have a lot of negative beliefs about my ability to communicate with others, so it's still moving every time someone posts their "perfect" Patch, because it means I've been understood perfectly, by a stranger halfway around the world maybe, and it's bonkers to have concrete proof.

At the same time, I love it just as much when people reverse-engineer (bootleg) my motifs — that is still a person in the world chewing on my art for hours on end, and it means I've had an idea worth biting! I love when people make "mistakes" and when people reinterpret the motifs to meet their own needs, because that's also how real communication works. If I didn't want to see variations on my designs, I would have them machine-embroidered in a factory somewhere (and the factories have been in touch, let me tell you!)

It's a fine, cowboy-type hat, but those inset corners are fussy, and the motif isn't a square, but it could be a square if a row were repeated, yielding an only modestly comically-tall, "10-Gallon" version:

Yeehaw. However, the repeated row (9) can be repeated as many times as one wishes, and I could not resist indicating this in the pattern:

Naturally, I had to crochet this heretofore-hypothetical "taller hat" and it's… possible I may have flown too close to the sun this time: