…UFOvember….

Part of crafting, is that not everything turns out perfectly. I am somewhat of a perfectionist at times, but depending on what I am making, I try to lean into the charm of the imperfect, and not let the pursuit of perfect freeze my progress. Obviously there are times I need to rework things and fix up problems. Clothes to wear? Definitely a fix, as demonstrated by my plans to replace the waistband of my Thurlow shorts, or the time I ripped out 200 rows of a knitted jumper. In quilting, I will unpick mismatched points. In crochet blankets? Well, when they are soft and squishy and drapey, I can live with a bit of a wobble in the sides.

Back in my 100 Days project, I finished my sunrise stripe sampler blanket. This blanket had been a pain from the beginning, to be honest. The original pattern we started with was pretty ordinary, so we moved away from that and started building our own. I found and lost various stitch guides. At one point during the 100 Days, I ripped back 18 rows after having a bit of a triangular thing happening. Once I started reflecting back the rows, I started having tension problems and struggled to get the patterns to match nicely. The middle colour block sat funny. I got it finished, and was so pleased to be able to draw a line under it and move on.

I got it out to photograph for the blog post, and no matter which way I folded and stretched and moved it, the difference in size between the two ends was just more than I could live with. In the bottom right photo above, you can see with the quilting ruler exactly how badly it had gone wrong. I started ripping it back, and the further back I went, the less mojo I had to correct it, and the more I considered just pulling out the whole thing and starting again.

So, friends, that’s what I’m doing. I am pulling apart a nominally finished blanket, and starting again with something completely different. As the weather warms up, my mandala is getting too big to be working on of an evening, so maybe a new blanket is just what I need. I am even tempted to make this one a knitted blanket instead of a crochet blanket.

These are some of the ideas I am kicking around. I did start a mitred square for the top right blanket, but they come out tiny and I was bored and overwhelmed after just one square, so I’m not convinced thats a good option, unless I alter the pattern to make the squares bigger. The two middle pictures are the two most appealing at the minute. Another idea I am kicking around is a log cabin style, not using a pattern but just winging it. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Today, I’m joining The Geeky Bobbin’s blog hop for the Rework week of UFOvember. For the whole month, bloggers are uniting to clear out our WIP piles and either resume, rework or rehome our neglected projects, and encourage you to do the same. You can visit all the previous and upcoming UFOvember bloggers at:

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