Catherine's Crochet Corner

This blanket has not been straightforward. In fact, I spent a large part of last week tearing my hair out (and sometimes getting a bit teary in frustration) over it.

Something wasn’t working. Twenty 6″ squares done, completed, ends sewn in and all – and they weren’t working. And it was only when I’d worked up the next square, a 9″ one, that I realised how badly it wasn’t working.

At first I thought it was colour order, then I thought it was the pattern, and finally I realised it was a combination of both. The pattern doesn’t fit with the overall blanket, and having ‘cloud blue’ in the colour scheme threw in a colder note that just doesn’t work.
I’m not kidding when I say I agonised over this for days, but there’s nothing for it. I am too much of a perfectionist to just shrug and let it go. I made the decision to set all twenty 6″ squares aside, and instead design a different square to go in this blanket. The square is pretty, and I’ll make something up with the ones I’ve made…it just doesn’t work in this particular blanket.

First, though, I gave myself a day off. Not from crochet entirely, because my hands fidget if I don’t have something on the go, but a day off from the blanket, in which I worked up a quick baby hat with yarn leftover from the Ripple Blue blanket I made six weeks ago.

The pattern is Baby Blues Hat, and I used bits of Stylecraft for Babies DK and Wondersoft Stardust, with a 5.5mm hook. A nice, quick project that didn’t require much thinking and was a good distraction from the agonies of my current blanket.

I’m back at work on the blanket, now. I’ve worked up one of the 12″ squares, and designed a new 6″ square, and things are definitely looking up.

Obviously I now have more work than I expected to have, at this stage – another twenty squares to make, sob – but I’m much happier. Onwards and upwards. It’s always better to spend more time and effort to get something right, rather than living with something that’s never going to make me happy!