Hi there - just bought your Jigglypuff pattern and I am having some difficulty w/ the arms, specifically why the need for PR. you dont really list why, a video would be helpful or any other tips you could email or put for subscribers? thank you!
Sorry about any confusion. That was always the one part that I figured would have the most issues since it was a term I made up myself. I’m mainly self taught for crochet and I never came across a similar situation in existing patterns, so I made it up; with the eventual intent to swap it with proper terminology if I ever came across it.
So why do I use the term PR (partial row)?
The best way I can describe this is that partial rows add curves into the structure without deforming stitch work. From a lot of the work I see online, people will often crochet basic tubes and then bend them as needed, and maintain the form either by using excess yarn to keep areas compressed or by lining the inside of their work with wire/pipe cleaners. This results in the overall finish having areas that look compress and/or stretched out, no longer maintaining the nice uniform stitch work. From a simple perspective, the image below shows this (assume it’s the side view of a crocheted tube, with each square representing a stitch).
The outer edge of the curve results in very stretched stitches and the inner curve the stitches end up compressed.Some people may remedy this by doing double stitches instead of single, giving more height, but again this disrupts the overall look.
What I do instead is insert partial rows. As seen below.
Again, imagine you’re looking at the side view of a cylinder, and the rows that are only 3 squares are partial rows. So instead of going around in the full circle, I only add stitches in a few spots before crocheting a full row again. That way it adds to the curvature without deforming the stitches. A word of warning though, too many partial rows right next to each other can cause holes in the piece. So it’s often better to spread them out if possible.
The reason I do this is it adds curves without the need of bending an existing structure and hoping for it to stay. So it’ll always maintain the shape. Another reason I use this method is for attaching limbs to the main body. If I did a regular open ended cylinder and attached it to the body, I’d get the shape below.
However, If I switched to partial rows as I went, I would get the image below.
Which is often a much more natural position of limbs. Or in the case of some stuffed animals could result in the animal having vertical legs | | versus angled legs protruding from the body / \ .
How do I interpret your terminology?
Unfortunately not as well as I’d hope. If a pattern goes as follows:
4) pr 2: sc 2, inc, sc 3 [7]
Rows 4 & 5 are partial rows. Once you finish crocheting row 3, row 4 is read as follows: “pr 2″ means you skip the first stitch that makes up row 3 and start in the second. You’d start with a single crochet into the 2nd stitch of row 3, continue with another single crochet, increase into the 4th stitch, then two more single crochets, and tie off. Resulting in 7 new stitches. Then for row 5, you’d skip the first stitch again, start with a single crochet into the 2nd stitch and do 5 single crochets total. More of a visual representation below (X = stitch, _ = no stitch)
Row 5: _ _ X XX X X X _ _
Row 4: _ X X XX X X X X _
(XX in row 4 is an increase, XX in row 5 is regular stitches just aligning with the X’s in Row 4)
Couldn’t you just do a slip stitch?
Maybe. But a slip stitch will still add a small amount of height to the row, making curves not as sharp as I’d like them to be. Honestly, I’ve never done a true comparison of doing it my current way and trying it with slip stitches instead. Maybe I’ll give it a shot at some point.
One last thing, what’s the clean edge about?
Typically if I use partial rows for a joint instead of a curve in the middle of a piece, I’ll add a clean edge This just means once all the rows are finished you go back and crochet a new row along the entire edge that’s showing. So going back to that visual example above. Once you have this shape:
I’d go back and add a new row (represented by the +’s ):
This should smooth out the overall edge.
Examples of partial rows:
The teal areas are extra stitches added in as partial rows. This helps the shape naturally bend in the direction as needed. The yellow and white rows are partial as well. This was needed because we go from a cylinder shape to a shape more similar to a shell. The orange stitching is the clean edge for a better attachment to the rest of the doll.
Let me know if there are still questions. I know I need to find a better way at explaining this since it is a very confusing method. But this is the method I use, and since people always seem interested in my patterns, I need to figure out how to simplify the instructions without modifying my methodology since that would result in a different finished piece than the original.