I decided to make this cute fish blanket. The technique I wanted to learn was reading knitting charts, since the fish pattern I liked was charted. I tried, but I couldn't read the chart. The writer wrote the chart so that I couldn't understand what the stitches were, and she didn't give stitch names, only descriptions. It also reminded me of cross-stitch, which is too much of an exercise in strict, controlled, dizzy counting than I prefer.
Utterly frustrated, I found a written pattern for fish. The problem with that was that the pattern was only written from head to fin, and I wanted to connect my fish in a long row, instead of sewing all the individual fish together at the end. It took a lot of finding-out skills and trial-and-error skills to determine how to read the pattern from bottom to top, increasing the decreases and decreasing the increases. I also had to make sure the correct increases and decreases were chosen, so that they slanted the correct way and looked similar to the original fish.
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The green is the original fish, and the purple is my modified "backwards & upside down" pattern.
-吴碧芙