Planned Pooling

I’ve tried planned pooling several times, and despite reading and watching tutorials about how to make it work, I could never get decent results. The patterns I used just didn’t seem to pool properly. Every tutorial I read seemed to offer the gold standard advice:  

Change hook sizes to get the desired number of stitches per color.

No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Until now. I started on the train Saturday using Red Heart Pooling yarn, which is supposed to be basically foolproof: three stitches per color with a six color repeat. The instructions from Yarnspirations specifically for this yarn indicated that I should be able to see the repeat within a couple of rows, and see the colors offset by one stitch every other row. I frogged and stitched and frogged and stitched, and despite trying every hook size three larger and three smaller than the recommended H hook, I could only see the repeats offset by two stitches every other row.

So I tried reducing the number of stitches per row. Every row, I eliminated a stitch by crocheting two HDC for the first two stitches of the row. I quickly saw my work bowing up at the sides and the rows were no longer offset at ALL. The colors were lining up perfectly. That would work great if I wanted stripes, but I wanted to see the classic argyle pattern. I frogged everything one last time, and thought:

This calls for a spreadsheet!

I marked out three boxes for each of my six colors:

The full repeat in my yarn is three stitches each of six colors. To give me the pattern I want, I end the first row one stitch early, so the last stitch of the last color wraps to the next row.

Then I work Row 2 in the same pattern, keeping the tension even to continue to give me three stitches each of the six colors, until the last color.

I know that I want the third row to be offset by ONE stitch from Row 1, so I have an extra stitch of the last color on that row. For the first stitch in Row 3, I crochet 2SCTog in the same C1 space to reduce my total number of stitches for that color to 2 stitches.

I want the row repeats to continue to be offset by one stitch in both directions, so I plan the next several rows accordingly. Row 3, Row 5, etc. continue to be reduced by one stitch using a 2SCTog after the turn.

Continue the pattern, eliminating one stitch in every odd row by completing one 2SCTog after the turn. Otherwise, keep stitches even by loosening or tightening the stitch tension to keep 3 stitches of every color in the pattern.

I don’t know about you, but this was not at all clear to me until I could visualize it in a grid like this. I have yet to see a video tutorial or written pattern that made it this clear that it might take more than just adjusting up or down a hook size to get the offset needed for the pattern to emerge. 

Try it. Impress your friends. Tell them it’s magic.