I woke up early this holiday morning and started my day out on the deck with one of my Clover tapestry needles weaving in ends. Yesterday, I had finished a new version of Square D-4, but there were still myriad ends to weave in, so I did.

Once that task was completed, I had to decide on what color the border would be.

I got out my trusty stash of Red Heart super saver yarn and tried in order: yellow, turqua, and spring green before I settled on blue. Once I had finished the square and put it in place, I decided to go with my original Square D-4. In the original, I had followed the directions to the letter, but the directions were not correct. Still, once I had the new, correctly made square in place, it was quite stiff from all of the ends that had been woven in and texturally was nothing like the squares around it.

At this point, I was having to tell myself that the time I had spent making a square I wasn’t going to use was simply part of the process. I had to assiduously ignore the part of myself that wanted to remind me that if I had just stuck with my original Square D-4, I would already be done.

From there, I made other adjustments, removing the outer rounds of two squares and redoing them with a different number of stitches so that they wouldn’t ruffle so flagrantly. I was ready to begin on the last two seams of the project just around the same time I was ready to eat lunch.

Fortified with a chicken pita sandwich, a side salad, and as much iced tea as I could drink, I returned, ready to finish piecing together the three remaining pieces pictured here:

After a couple of mis-starts (one in which I trimmed the yarn I was using to join the seam), I finally got to the end of the shorter of the two seams. I laid it out to see how it looked, and while it did not fit together as perfectly as I am accustomed to making things fit, it was better than I had thought it would be.

The next challenge was the longest seam of the piece. I had counted the stitches several times and knew that the two pieces did not fit together perfectly, so I was going to have to go slowly and check the ease as I went. As much as I wanted precise directions to guide me, I knew that they did not exist, and that if they did, they would have had no bearing on the task at hand.

Here is the result:

There are still ends to be woven in, borders to be crocheted, and blocking to be done, but the days of the afghan-that-has-eluded-me are numbered.