This yarn was always going to be for my son - He might be 13 years old (now) but he's always been a My Little Pony fan. He has so much of the merchandise, and even did a presentation in school 18 months ago about how he liked MLP, and that was OK because people can like whatever they want. I did try to get him to let his little sister have the yarn for a blanket, considering they were very feminine colours and he did already have a blanket, but no. He was adamant. And so in July last year, I started work on what would become the most frustrating granny square blanket ever...
It started off well. I wanted to make a solid granny square blanket with a rustic feel. The size of the blanket was always going to be an issue because it was a comparatively small ratio of sock yarn to a much larger teenage boy. As such I worked out that I could get 13 2-inch squares to one mini-skein of yarn, and that if I added some white and cream I could make blocks and make the yarn go further. I had 5 months til Christmas and it would be a great gift! It was a great idea, in theory...
I was pregnant at the time. Hot, heavy, tired, and struggling with all of the negatives that pregnancy could bring. There were days when I was so ill that I couldn't bear to lift my hook, days that were so hot that working on a blanket was out of the question, and towards the end, days when I would just sleep. All day... But still I thought I could do it. I pushed through, often running out of the Drops Safran cotton that I bought from Wool Warehouse and having to wait while more was delivered - I had miscounted so badly. I was only getting 18 squares per ball, as opposed to the 25-30 I had expected.
Then December arrived. "I'm so close" I thought...."Only...how many squares to go..?" It was then that I felt the impending failure... I still needed over 150 squares... The blanket on a whole would later comprise of a total 493 3-inch squares. My contractions started on the morning of the 4th. The never-ending blanket felt like it would never be completed. I tried crocheting while I was in labour but I couldn't focus on my counting... It was just too much of a distraction. My daughter arrived on the 5th. I tried crocheting while she was sleeping, but I was just too tired... Christmas came and went, and I felt so guilty, like I had let my son down.
But as my daughter got older, I learned to crochet while she was feeding, or sleeping in my arms. But I had a lot of long nights in those early weeks, and I needed something to keep me awake after the midwives had put the fear of God into me. It was still extremely slow going, and as I started top-stitching some definition onto the blocks I felt that it was going to last forever, it was getting just that tedious.
Obviously it didn't last forever, though how I found the will to continue through to the end, I'm still not sure... On Mothers' day in March, (funnily enough, four years on from the Mothers' day on which I finished the Minecraft blanket) I was ready to give my son the blanket which he had waited two years for. At least the end project is enjoyable, even if the act of creating it was somewhat of a chore.
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