Unravelling...

A little over a week ago, after finishing Luke in a Dinosaur Suit, I was feeling rather confident and decided to try a baby blanket from my Stitch 'n Bitch Crochet - The Happy Hooker book. I went to Michaels and after debating over yarn colours for what my husband felt was an eternity, I chose Wood, Cranberry and Fisherman. I happily started my project, was half way done (24 rows) before I sat down and unraveled each and every row.

The first thing I found that was wrong with it, I sort of was like "Meh whatever, it's for me, I can live with that, but then I saw another and then a final 3rd one encouraged me that I should just start all over again because the perfectionist part of me was going to see every single one of these errors and it was going to drive me looney.

First mistake - I decided that the pattern width was not wide enough. They always seem to make receiving blankets and other items too small, so I decided I'm add an additional 3" to the width. It was not until row 24 (why oh why did it take me that long to really notice?) that I decided it was definitely too wide. That coupled with the fact that when I asked my dear Husband "Honey you do not think this is to wide do you?" and he answered "No not at all, how many more rows are you adding to the width?". Ummm no the width is this way, not vertical. oiy

My next mistake was tension. I chained on 90ish chains and made them a bit too tight. When I then added on each additional row, the bottom part of the blanket started to arch downward and would not lay flat. Slightly frustrating. I pulled to try and straighten it out, to no avail. This is the mistake I felt I would just live with since hey, it's for me after all right?

My final mistake was that I started my first row with Cranberry, when it would have been Wood. I wanted to do the border in Cranberry, so by starting with cranberry, that meant I could not do it that way, or I'd have 2 double rows of red together and it'd just look funny. My excuse not to unravel when I realized this was "Oh I'll just do the border in Wood instead, even though I really wanted it in Red.

So I've re-started the blanket, this time only chaining 76 st like the pattern says, I started with Wood instead of Cranberry and I made nice loose chains so that my blanket is not arching downward. So far, so good. I'm however, only on row two, so there is still lots of time to flub it up again. :p