It’s not often that a patterns leaves me scratching my head.  And when it does, I’m often not sure if the problem is the pattern, or me over-thinking it.

In this case I was making a teeny-tiny zipper pouch, a free pattern available on Craftsy.  The pattern instructions don’t have much in the way of illustrations, so you’re stuck trying to puzzle what’s written.  This is the step that had me baffled:

Folding the fabric to match at the outside edges.  Folding it to match the bottom seam and zipper teeth?  Folding it …. under?  In?  Folding it to match itself?

I admit that the first few (several) times I read through the pattern I missed the line three steps down that says “box the corners.”  I was too busy trying to figure out what “folding the fabric to match” meant.

If you track the pattern back to the designers’ website, there’s an accompanying video on the pattern page.  This makes things much clearer:  you don’t do any special folding, you just line the seam up with the zipper and flatten the rest out.  It also shows you how they box the corners.

Even though this pattern is marked for beginners and is available by itself (without the video) on Craftsy, it doesn’t seem like it was written to stand on its own.  The instructions make perfect sense once you watch the video, but without that they’re a little opaque.

I doubt this is on purpose.  I think it’s a case of the writer knowing exactly what they mean and mentally filling in the gaps in the instructions.  It’s a common problem in all kinds of the writing and why it’s valuable to have a second set of eyes.  We (writers) are too close to our own writing and tend to read what we meant instead of what we wrote.

I ended up with something interesting while fumbling around with the pattern, but not exactly the intended end product.

It has some charm, but I think it’s time to make some more—with the correct technique.