Odd random thought

I got all the body pieces made and attached to Treehugger last night, but the hair and tail....well, that's gonna take a while. I forgot how long I-cord lengths took.

After getting into bed, I thought about a couple things:

1. There are so many more of these kinds of things I'd like to make.
2. Some of the people who do the stuffed ponies that actually get featured on Equestria Daily must have nothing else as demands on their time, and be able to sew very, very fast, as there are the "new" background ponies from each week's episode showing up the day after it airs.
3. Those people must also either have a giant supply closet with every color of fleece there is, or they live near a fabric store that is always well-stocked.

And I got to thinking about 3-D printing then, and how it could be used to do things like make blindbag-figure sized versions of ponies. (I suspect the only way I have a hope of getting a Cheese Sandwich in that size is to go that route; they're now onto the "let's repeat the first wave of figures" wave, and I never managed to find ol' Cheese and now his "wave" is long gone).

And then I thought: how nice it would be if they had a 3-D printer that would make SOFT things, where you could render a three-dimensional version of the stuffed toy you wanted using software, and then the printer would fabricate it.

Then I thought, given the 3-D printers I've seen (they use spools of a thin plastic tube, not unlike thread), that really, crocheting is its own type of "3-D printing," just much, much slower and lower tech, and sometimes you have to use trial and error to get the rendering right. (And rip back, and redo...) It's been a while since I designed anything in crochet and really what I need to do is let go of the desire to write up what I design as a pattern because that's the part that stymies me - the idea of writing down what you did *every single round* so you can tell other people. Maybe it's better, when I want something, to just scrumble it up without trying to remember or note down what I did....maybe letting go of whatever tiny fleeting fame I might gain as a "designer" would allow me better to just make what I wanted *for myself*.

I wonder how designers do it? Do they write down instructions for every row as they do it? Do they make the thing, take it apart, and then re-make it to be sure? (I would hate having to unravel one of my critters and re-do it). Or is there some kind of way of reverse-engineering that they can do and I cannot, by looking at the finished creature and being able to see, "Oh yes, I did three HDCs in that stitch, followed by an inverse-decrease in the next two"?