Out Of My Head – The Story of the Art Deco Tiles Mosaic Crochet Pattern

Have you ever had a thought that would not get out of your head, especially when you have other things you need to do first?

Or a song that is playing in the very back of your head, that you start to hum without even knowing it?

When I was studying architecture, I had sudden urges of ‘needing’ to clean. Most urgent, of course, when a design draft was due…

Maybe you can relate.

Well, it was a similar situation with this pattern. I was working on the Claire square in order to bring it to the Wrapped in Jamie Clan as soon as possible, when suddenly the picture for these tiles showed up again and again.

I believe in never wasting a good idea, so I gave in and quickly sketched down the chart for later reference.

The pictures kept coming back though, distracting me from the editing process on Claire. I thought, “Maybe a quick swatch…Can’t hurt and is quickly enough to make”.

This lead to an inset mosaic crochet swatch in black and white.

Now as you can notice, the pattern is quite distorted. Part of the reason is probably that I am crocheting with a loose tension, but also the type of mosaic crochet that was used.

While on a positive note inset mosaic crochet allows us to work with one colour for two rows and take that colour up on one side, the downside is that we have two rows in height compared to one stitch in width.

Overlay mosaic crochet in contrast requires us to create a lot of beginning and finishing ends, as there is only one row per colour, which is cut each row. The advantage with overlay is – especially for people work with a loose tension, like me – that in the pattern a stitch is more proportional: 1 wide, 1 high.

So, of course, an overlay mosaic crochet swatch was in order.

That looked much better already and got me quite excited. I intended to go back to Claire now, but there was still this one question unanswered.

If you are familiar with the Wrapped in Jamie CAL and the designs there, you know that there are only free front loops where they are needed to anchor a long stitch in a later round.

So why are ALL single crochet stitches (US terminology; UK: double crochets) worked in the back loop only, whether they will be worked into later on or not?

That needed to be explored and examined and a comparison swatch was necessary.

I think this was the time when the overlay mosaic bug got me without me noticing…

Maybe it is the colour and with a higher contrast working in both loops of the free single crochet stitches would work. As it is, the both loop option does not seem to be as crisp and clear as working ALL single crochet stitches in the back loop only.

So that should have been the end of it really, but intrigued by the technique, I had already started making a wrap, using one of my favourite go-to cotton yarns.

At least I managed to restrain myself to working on it only, when I could no longer sit and work on the computer.

As the wrap slowly started to come together and I shared pictures on Instagram and in the Mosaic Crochet group in facebook, people started to notice the pattern, liked it and asked if a pattern would be available.