Crochet Parfait: Working Out the Kinks for a New Pattern

I saw this beautiful scrap heart afghan on Pinterest (Char Ami Blog) and I thought the pattern would be really nice for some fingerless gloves.

I found the original pattern on Crochet World. It looks nice, but I needed to make some changes.

The original pattern changed every 7 stitches and that was too long to work for a glove so I changed it to every 5 stitches. I worked out the pattern in the flat first, but I want to be able to do it in the round.

So I made a ridged cuff with 30 rows (multiple of 5) to attach to the pattern.

The pattern also uses spike stitches in between the hearts. This makes it so you can crochet over the chain stitches between the hearts, but it makes it so the glove is full of holes, not particularly warm.

So I changed the spikes to double crochets that go outside the chain stitches. This made the gaps smaller.

Then I had to come up with a way to increase around the thumb. I tried adding an extra heart motif, but it would have put me off my 5 stitch pattern change, so instead I increased the number of double crochets in the thumb area for a couple of rows. (I also had to add more chain stitches between the hearts as you can see. For the long row of doubles I had to slip stitch to the chain in the middle so it wouldn't be hanging loose.

After two rows of increased doubles I needed a thumb hole so instead of using doubles on this row I used single crochets for the next two white rows. By decreasing the number of single crochets I was able to bring the pattern back to it's original size for the fingers.