I woke up this morning determined to finish my crochet rendition of Georgia O’Keffee’s painting, My Last Door. I had it in my head that I would finish all of the seaming by mid-afternoon, then I would get it up on my back fence. But once I got out to the fence with my staple gun and yarn bomb in hand, I found that overlooked joining three inches of one seam. It turned out that my much anticipated new yarn bomb was not quite ready for prime time.

So I trundled back to the house with my staple gun, staples, cell phone, and yarn bomb in hand to finish up the last three inches of forty-five feet of seaming that needed to be done before I could install my new yarn bomb.

Most of the day I had worked on the forty-five feet of seaming. First joining the twenty-eight crochet panels into seven columns of four squares each, then joining the seven columns into one big, crochet mural.

But as I began my work this morning, I overlooked an important step—stretching the squares before joining. Stretching at this juncture makes it much easier to stretch the yarn bomb when it’s time to install it. So after remedially stretching a few squares that were already joined, I stopped and stretched all of the remaining squares before I went any further.

Here is how one square looked before stretching:

and here is how it looked after:

Visually, the difference is subtle, but doing this “pre-stretching” helps to get the finished piece ready for prime time. Then, when you put it up, it looks its very best.

With all of the squares stretched, I was ready to start seaming in earnest, which I did. Stitch after stitch, square after square, column after column.

Eventually though, even after the snafu where I missed a spot of seaming, it was all done and ready to be installed:

One staple at a time!