It's hip to be square

  Many moons ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was sitting around the campfire trying to keep warm, I decided I wanted to learn to knit.  Okay, maybe it was in the sixties, but to some reading this it might as well be the dinosaur age.  My mother and I took classes from a lady in town.  I learned to knit, purl, make cables, and knit in buttonholes.  I knit a cardigan sweater and was so proud of it I wore it all the time despite the fact I never sewed buttons on it.

  I proceeded to knitting more sweaters, vests, hats, baby sweaters and bonnets and booties and even clothes for my children.  I was pretty good at it.  Then I found a book for an afghan where each block had a different knitting stitch in each one.  What better way to get some experience knitting new stuff, I thought.  I began knitting blocks, one after the other.  Sadly, they were all supposed to be the same size, but I was never good at gauging my knitting stitches. Sometimes I knit loosely, and sometimes I knit tightly.  I ended up with several different sizes of blocks.

  As you can see, my blocks were not the same size.

  Some were quite gigantic.  After all the blocks were knit, they were to be crocheted around and crocheted together.  That was the catch.  I didn't know how to crochet and so the blocks sat in plastic bags in various rooms for years and years until a couple of weeks ago I brought them to David, my manly husband, who, by the way, knows how to crochet.  He taught himself years ago and crocheted baby blankets and a giant afghan, then, like me with my knitting needles, he hung up his crochet hooks and went on to other things like making a living.

  Then, one day, something crazy happened.  The blocks exploded all over David and he had no choice but to crochet his way out.  No, that didn't happen.  I threw these all over him while he patiently crochets a border around each of the blocks and crochets them together. 

  He is crocheting black, red and blue borders around each block to make them all the same size, so some have wide borders and some narrow.  This will be a sort of crazy quilt type afghan when he is finished.  Then if he isn't totally sick of it by then, he will crochet a border around the whole thing.  Eleven blocks done and thirty four more to go.  Next year, I will maybe, hopefully, or not show you a finished afghan.

   Meanwhile, Bonnie and Belle sleep on the sunwashed deck oblivious to all the excitement going on in our house.  Bye.