I Give

I'm letting go of the dream of the fringe I had pictured from the beginning for the bamboo baby afghan. It has taken me over a month since the first inklings of a problem to give up finding a workable solution that preserves the dream not to mention the 155 fringe pieces themselves.

The problem, for those who haven't been following this folly with me, is that the bamboo thread is too slippery to hold a snug half knot and thus the fringe pieces keep loosening up and slipping free of the loop as I continue to work with the afghan. I had gotten not much further than what is visible in the pic at top when I began to notice the problem. But I thought I had found a solution in the use of a slip stick to tack them down so I went ahead an put in the remaining fringe pieces on the one end of the afghan. Then I tried my slip stitch idea and ran into problem after problem after frustration after arrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!

It began to seem as if I spent half my time or more while handling or working on it snugging down those fringes or reattaching them or keeping them out of the way of the hook or getting the hook unsnagged from them or unsnagging the treads of the fringe from the thread of the tacking stitch or replacing a fringe piece that got too frazzled.

But it would have all been worth it IF the tacking stitch idea had worked. I tried tacking them by crocheting with the slip stitch and then with the single crochet and then using a tapestry needle and a couching stitch. Each one had one or more issues beyond the frustrations of working them as listed above. The stitches bunching the edge of the afghan so it wouldn't lay flat; the stitching creating a stiff, scratchy line on the edge, the fringe pieces refusing to hang straight and poking this way and that--these were some of the most egregious issues.

But I have beat my brain into mush and my eyes into jelly experimenting with possible solutions that always end up failing and researching online hoping to find that someone else has encounter the same problem and found a solution.

No joy.

And that's the crux of it too, because of this problem I've lost my joy in the work. I've really been weighted down with this for weeks now and when I began to seriously entertain the idea of removing the 155 fringe pieces and finding an alternative a few hours ago I had my first inkling in weeks of a sense of lightness in both senses of the word.

I think what helped bring me to the place where I was ready to accept the inevitable was that the last experiment on behalf of the fringe involved crocheting a bookmark on which to experiment on with the fray check. An experiment that failed BTW but during the several days it took to make and fringe the bookmark and apply the fray check and wait for it to set, I made several more bookmarks and explored cross stitch and needlepoint projects online and this has reminded me of the pleasure these endeavors are supposed to provide.


So tonight I researched alternative fringe and edging concepts and settled on three options, all fringe varieties. I'm going to sleep on those choices and tomorrow decide on one and remove the failed fringe.

I took one last picture of the afghan with the failed fringe tonight. Sad bedraggled thing.