Update about Mum's blanket - Number 473

I know you must be sick of these, god knows I am, but I feel like I need to keep posting about it on here because blogging about the blanket seems to galvanise me into action and I start working on it like a mad woman.

Sometimes when I think about this blanket I start to hyperventilate because I think about the prospect of not getting it finished on time. I know that really, I will finish it, it might mean a couple of nights with very little sleep but it will get done, purely because it has to. I’ve always been a bit of a deadline addict, I was never one of those people who finished their essays two weeks before they were due in, I was last minute Annie. But I never missed a deadline and I’m holding on to that fact at the moment.

I somehow managed to join all the squares together. I don’t really know how I did it because the granny stripe squares didn’t have nice little stitches for me to use when joining together so I just fudged it and randomly stuck my hook in where it seemed right and soon I had them all joined together nicely as shown in this picture.

Now.

I know you can see it. I can see it too. No I didn’t mean for some of the squares to be in the wrong direction. Yes I did beat my puny little fists desperately on the bed when I realised my mistake. Yes I did use some fairly foul language. I have no idea how it happened, I took a photo of if all laid out before I started joining them together and I kept checking the photo so I’m not entirely sure at which point my brain just decided to give up completely.

Could I face unpicking them even though it drives me a little bit mad to look at?

No. To unpick it would have been admitting defeat in some way shape or form and I worried that if I did that I might end up giving up on the blanket altogether. And then I remembered something that my Mum told me many years ago – when the Amish are making their quilts they always put in a deliberate mistake because no-one is perfect except for God. Now we know how I feel about God but I am taking this message to heart and I am telling myself over and over again that this mistake is a good thing. A deliberate thing. It does offer me some comfort because I’m yet to produce something crocheted that doesn’t have a mistake in it somewhere – this neatly explains it all away – those mistakes should be in there! Excellent.

So I felt rather smug about finally getting the squares joined together and was feeling pretty good about the whole thing and I knew I had some weekends to spend on it and all was well in the world. Until I spent a weekend at Mum’s making sure she didn’t go mental from the snow-enforced cabin fever which meant I couldn’t work on it. This was nightmarish because it meant that I lost my rhythm and I again got overtaken by the fear because I knew what came next would be a challenge – doing an edging.

This called for a case of fudging again and I decided to feverishly whack my hook in any old place and do a row of DC all the way round. So far it seems to be working and from here on in it’s just plain sailing, right?!

*sigh*

I really don’t love this blanket you know.