Last week at this time I thought I had made good progress on the shell strip of the groovyghan.

I had followed the directions, and the number of single crochet stitches I had made across the strip of the flower motif and upon which I would build the shell strip was a multiple of 4 plus one. I had crocheted twelve or thirteen rows when I laid it to take a photograph.

Often when I look at what the camera sees, I notice things that my eyes miss, and it was in that moment, as I was about to document my progress, that I saw that the outer edge of the shell stitch was appreciably wider than the outer edge of the flower motif strip.

I could attempt a forced fitting but I have done that before, and I wanted the pieces to fit together as well as they could, so in the end, I took all the rows of the shell trip and started over.

In doing so, I found that a certain multiple of 6 plus 1 got me the best fitting result for my gauge, and I made 199 evenly spaced single crochet stitches along the edge of the flower motif strip and proceeded to work the remainder of the rows needed to complete the afghan.

Then, today, while my mother’s dog and I waited patiently for my mother’s appointment to be over, I finished the three remaining rows and weaved in all but three ends:

I decided to lay out all the strips to get an idea of how the afghan will look when finished:

Sometimes when I make a mistake in crochet, I hesitate to pull out all of the stitches that need to be pulled out in order to make the needed adjustments. While I almost always end up pulling the stitches out, there is often a protracted period of indecision before I do what must be done. This time, however, I just undid what I needed to undo and moved on.

There was no looking back, no spending four times I as long as it would take to redo it attempting to find another solution that would leave the offending stitches in place. I simply pulled out the stitches and wound the yarn into balls that I could use for the reworking:

Now that the doing and redoing is completed, I am glad that I did not spend time on hesitation or rationalization. The granny square strip was easy to join to the shell strip, and while there was a touch of ruffling, it was no where near as dire as it would have been had I insisted on moving forward with what were, for my gauge, too many stitches.

Tomorrow is a new day, and I have some waiting scheduled in between errands, and I am looking forward to whatever work there is to be done and undone.