How I failed on two vintage patterns and a few others.

​Sometimes people ask me if I ever fail with crocheting patterns.  They think because I’m so prolific with finished projects I must never have to take them out.   The answer is I fail, often.  
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My failure on recently published patterns:
Sometimes I fail over and over.  I have a beautiful shawl kit I got at a conference but I can’t get past the third row.  Somehow, I miscount in one of the first two rows every single time.  It’s not the fault of the pattern writer because I can work backwards and see exactly where I made the mistake but I keep making one every time.   That pattern has been put away for now.  This one needs a hard reset – I may try a different yarn to see if that can help me get past my mistakes.
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I made my sister a cool skull top.  I thought the gauge was fine and since the pattern didn’t have a version small enough for her I even adjusted for that.  Or so I thought.  After getting the front and back done I realized it was too big for me and she’s a few sizes smaller than I am.   I had to take apart the entire project and start over.  I ended up going down a yarn size and a hook size and it ended up much better.  Plus the original color was gray and the wine color of this is gorgeous.   In this case, it was partly a pattern gauge problem and partly a resizing problem so I had to work out the math on this one and retry it.

​My failure on vintage patterns:

My most recent failures involve two vintage hats.  A friend was having a 50th birthday party with a 1950s theme.  I had a dress I bought at a vintage shop and wanted to make a pillbox hat for the party.  I had the perfect pattern:

​Or so I thought.   My first attempt on this gave me a very short hat.   I thought that would be easy to remedy so I added some rows.  Then it got wider than would work on my head.  Ugh.  I ripped it all out and decided to try a different pattern:

I manged to finish this one, including putting the hat wire in and then I tried to block it.  I ended up with a Frisbee.   I cut out the wire and tossed the rest of it in the garbage.  I wore my hair up with no hat.

Do you ever fail with crafts?  How do you deal with that?