WBS Blanket Progress: Ready to Assemble!

One last post before we join the squares together

  As you may have read in my last post, things keep getting in the way of finishing the Nine Square Blanket. Please excuse a bit of complaining in this post... First, I ran out of the right colors and had to wait on my shipment of yarn. Then, there was a death in my pet family, and I just couldn't concentrate on work for a few days. Now that I'm back at it, the weather has been acting up and a scattering of thunderstorms keeps taking away the light I need to take my photos, along with my electricity. While I'm still working through the final assembly of the squares, I'll share with you what I have ready so far. 

  Again, and as always, remember that the pattern for the Nine Square Blanket is not my design. It's provided for free by Yarnspirations for the World's Biggest Stocking project! We can all be a part of setting a world record, while crocheting (or knitting!) blankets that will be donated to military charities. 

Let's get started!

The original pattern for the Nine Square Blanket requires five squares made in Aran. Here is two of the squares completed, and what I have left of a full skein afterwards. I was able to make four of these squares without having to join yarn, then joined what was left of the two skeins to complete the fifth square.

Hey, beginners: I hear a lot of you say that your work never comes out as straight as mine! And what do I always tell you? BLOCKING! I am obsessive about taking perfect photos, and take quite a bit of time straightening out my edges before each one I take.
Here's where I stopped to join the yarn on the fifth square. I decided to show you guys what my work looks like sometimes before I straighten it out. Not so pretty now, is it? If you hold up your work in weird ways like I do, or constantly move around like me, your work is bound to get stretched out in weird ways. A little bit of straightening goes a long way!

And here's all the squares, ready to go! But, here's also where another thunderstorm rolled through, and knocked out the power for a couple of hours. No light, no computer, so I had to take a break again... It was dark before they got the electricity on again.

  On a side note, perhaps I should take a moment to thank my power company. Seriously, thanks to the workers that come out in rain and lightning to fix the problem. And "thanks" to the company that sends them out in dangerous conditions to repeatedly repair the splice in the line down the road... The splice that's been there for the last eight years... The splice that's the reason why the power goes out every time the wind blows... Yeah. Thanks for sending those people out in terrible weather to always fix that problem that you could probably fix the right way during fair weather, so we wouldn't have this problem anymore. Worrying about installing digital meters was soooooo much more important than that...




Anyway...

Life happens. I had to drive 10 miles in a thunderstorm the next day to go grocery shopping (at Walmart on a Sunday... Noooo!) before I could get back to it. So, by the time I dried off, got the groceries put away, and sat down with a cup of coffee, I was mentally and physically exhausted. So naturally, I messed up and started joining the squares backwards.

  Ugh. I don't mean to sound like I'm whining, but why are these projects fighting me? I want to make these blankets for an awesome and good cause, but it's getting stressful, fighting yarn trolls and dying cats and thunderstorms, and me messing up all the time! I need a vacation in a mythical land where bad weather, unruly dogs (he ate part of my wall again), and Walmart stores don't exist!

Again, anyways... So, I'm taking it apart to start over. I won't let it stress me out too much. After all, there's plenty of WIP's around here to work on when the next thunderstorm hits in about an hour!

We had four inches of rain in under an hour last night.

So much for living in the "Sunshine State"...

  With all that complaining, perhaps I should say that I'm thankful to still have a roof over my head, if not dry land underfoot. There's others out there facing much worse than this. 

Happy Crocheting!