Following a Pattern

Months ago I saw a pattern I liked for an afghan. I looked around for yarn to use for it, but was uninspired, so the pattern sat unused for some time.

After a while, the company that the pattern came from was having a 'free shipping' promotion on online purchases, so I went ahead and bought the yarn that way. When it arrived in the mail, I began to crochet.

That's when things got complicated.

The afghan is made up of 30 units (called 'blocks', which are actually rectangles), using 3 different patterns. That sounds easy enough, and I thought that doing 30 small pieces would be a lot more manageable than doing one huge one.

But I was wrong.

You see, when you do 10 pieces of the same pattern, they should all be the same size. And mine aren't. Some are quite close, others (2 or 3) are almost perfect. But there's a fair bit of variation over the 10 pieces.

AND...

...when you have 3 different patterns to follow, the resulting blocks should be the same size as well. But I've had to do so much fiddling to get my single crochet blocks to be the same as the double crochet blocks, first by making my stitches looser or tighter, then by increasing or decreasing the number of stitches in each row... And still they aren't the same.

It makes me very nervous to try the third pattern which is more complicated, because changing the number of stitches in a row will change the pattern and it'll require a fair bit of figuring to determine what will work. And because I also know that, no matter how perfectly my adjustments work out on paper, when I actually crochet them, they'll be no more consistent than my first two styles have been.

Sigh.

But I'm still trying. I'm crocheting piece after piece. I'm pulling out rows, sometimes too many to count, sometimes a whole block's worth (I'm sure I've actually crocheted enough blocks to make the afghan, even though I only have 12 pieces sitting in front of me now).

These blocks have taken on a life of their own for me. I want each of them to be perfect, to match the others in size and shape and texture, but they all come out differently. Some are nice, others are filled with flaws. Some I have to pull out and start over.

In the end, though, once each block is pieced together with all the others, the result will have its own beauty, will look like no one else's, and will be completely mine.

Sounds a bit like the days my Lord has given me.