Today, after removing each one of two long seams and reworking them, I finished joining two of the four strips that border the twelve central squares of the-afghan-that-has-eluded-me, while I didn’t put it all together, I am almost past the tipping point.

It is not going as perfectly as I would like:

Things don’t fit exactly, and there is one square in particular I would make differently if I knew then what I know now, but part of the reason I wanted to complete this project is that it challenges me on many levels.

On one level, there was the challenge of decoding the directions. On another level, there was the challenge of determining whether the directions given had any relationship to the square pictured. On yet another level, there were my attempts (some more successful than others) to reverse engineer the squares where the directions were wrong or referred to other directions that were wrong.

The goal has not been perfection, but learning figure out how to fit things together that don’t necessarily fit together.

When I design my own afghans, or make modifications to the patterns of others, I work to make all of the everything fits together neatly. Planes lie flat and the edges of the pieces abut each other precisely. I redo or set aside those elements where I haven’t gotten the gauge correct.

While having shapes and sizes that are mismatched is uncomfortable for me, I want to see if I can work past that discomfort, at least once.