That said I tried a new pattern this week. It's one of the free downloads from knit picks called Ebb and Flow Dishcloth.
I love the simplicity of this cloth while it looks really fancy, it's very easy to do and you quickly don't have to think about the repeats.
That said I found a number of issues with this pattern. They really haven't done a good job of editing their free patterns and if you aren't confident with what you're doing it's easy to misread their patterns and mess up.
1. It's in US crochet terms so make sure you're aware of that.
2. One thing they don't mention that is useful to know is that you want to have 40 stitches across as you stitch and it is good to keep an eye on it. I found the when you came up to the SC rows it's really important to watch because it's easy to lose track of the pattern.
3. The other part that can be tricky until you work out what you're doing is the crossed double crochet stitch. I've got some pictures below. They are easy, you skip the first stitch and do a double crochet. Then you do the next double crochet in the skipped stitch. It feels weird but the more you do it the better you get.
The other tricky bit with this part is when you start the row with the crossed double crochet you need to skip the first stitch because you've made a 3 chain and then you skip the second stitch and do a double crochet in the third stitch from the beginning. This is because you have to come back and do the crossed double crochet.
You can see that you have two stitches that are crossed over and they do look a little weird at first but you get used to it.
The other thing I found with this pattern is that they recommend cutting off the yarn after each colour. That is stupid. What I changed was to carry the yarns up the side and at the end I add a border around the finished cloth. I think this just makes it look neater and there are only a couple of ends to tie in instead of 30!
4. For the border I went round with a row of single crochets and then went around with a border of reverse single crochet.
5. Where it says to repeat rows 1-8 you actually want to repeat rows 3-10 as you don't need to have double blue rows. They have labelled two sets of rows as 1 and 2.
I hope you do enjoy working on this cloth and that this has helped you work through the pattern.
Happy Stitching,
Caitlin