After telling Wilzie for years that I was going to knit him a blanket, I finally sat down last fall and with my knitting needles and got to work.

I was making pretty good progress too, but once I finished my Christmas knit-a-palooza, I kind of lost my mojo and his blanket sat, unfinished, all winter.

I decided last week that I needed to finish this darn thing once and for all, or else it wouldn’t be done by the time this winter rolled around (and, this being Edmonton, that could be any time now).  Luckily it was almost done when I put it down around Christmas, so I didn’t have that much left to do.

But when I picked it up to get back to work, I was reminded of just how awful a job I had done.  The blanket is a mish-mash of colours and patterns.  I experimented with several different kinds of stitches, looking for one that both looked good and was easy enough to master*.

There was no real symmetry – the stripes were all different widths and I’m pretty sure it was wider on one end than it was on the other – and there were holes all over the place from many a dropped stitch.  Also – it was really, really long and narrow.  But, I had come this far, so I ignored my perfectionist tendencies and made up my mind to finish the damn thing.  

And Wilzie was going to like – and use - the damn thing, regardless of how ghetto it ended up looking.

I finished up the last few rows, and gave it to Wilzie to try.  He looked like he was trying to take cover under a very long scarf – I figured I could just add a really wide border to try to extend the width.

I worked for days to crochet the border, covered under this miles-long blanket in the hottest days of our summer (which, granted isn’t really saying much).  As I knitted, I thought I noticed a disturbing trend materializing, but chose to ignore it and kept adding on the stitches.

When I ran out of yarn, I deemed the blanket good enough complete and threw the finished product over my husband.

It looked…strange.

One side of the blanket looked shortened some how.  Upon closer inspection, the crocheting of the border had gathered up the whole length of the blanket making the left edge, at least, a full foot shorter than the right side and all weirdly puckered up.

I let out a frustrated sigh, and Wilzie began to chuckle.  And while trying to tell me how nice it was, he started to laugh even harder.  Eventually he had tears streaming out of his eyes as he sputtered out:

“IT’S JUST LIKE A FITTED SHEET!  I’VE ALWAYS WANTED A FITTED AFGHAN!”

As he convulsed with laughter**, I ripped the blanket off of him and stomped away determined to fix the damned thing.

Much better!

*I have never actually been taught any technical skills of knitting (or crocheting) – so thanks YouTube for showing me how to knit a crappy-ass blanket.

**At least it wasn’t a complete waste of time – I managed to make my Husband laugh harder than I have ever seen in the last 11 years together.