Cupcake Unfinished and Stitches

I finished the back of Cupcake, from the Happy Hooker. My gauge is completely different from the pattern, so I changed the measurements and the increases a lot. I started another one, but it would have been way too small, because I didn't pay attention to the gauge at first. I used the recommended Amazon DK yarn, which was cheap, and seems good so far.
I haven't been working on this project for a while, since I got a stitch dictionary, Vogue Stitchionary. The book has a lot of good stitches in it, that seem up to date. I looked at some other books, and a lot of the patterns reminded me of bad clothing from the seventies and eighties. I've been trying out different lace patterns with different yarns, to see how the yarn affects the lace pattern. It's interesting, because I get a lot of ideas of things to add to plain patterns that I've seen.