Waaaaah!

I am so so so so frustrated with the fringe work on the baby afghan.

I've been beating my brain on the problem for a month. Well I did set it aside for a couple weeks our of frustration and in order to get the silk shawl done for my MIL birthday last Friday. But I've wrestled with it for hours each day since Friday. With nothing to show for it.

I'm past bored now too. And am itching to get on with other projects both begun and anticipated. Like the one I discussed in last night's post as a potential Xmas gift involving several hundred hours of work that needs to be started soon. But before I can start a new major project I HAVE to get the afghan finished.

I'm about this || close to yanking out all 155 fringe pieces on the one side I've attached them and start crocheting a border instead. I'm beginning to accept that it is the nature of the bamboo thread--its slipperiness--that prevents the piece from staying snug in the half knot that works just fine with most yarns. At any rate my attempts to tack the fringe pieces down with a crochet or couching stitches is running into snag after snag. Literally snags in many cases. I thought late Sunday night that I had finally found the right combination of stitches to keep the loop from loosening and allowing the ends to slip out during the typically rough handling a baby afghan will get.

But when I look at the section that is tacked down I find the fringe doesn't lay right, poking out every which way on some and on some a thread or two has been caught in the stitch wrong and bunches or points sideways. The stitches are also bunching up the fabric of the afghan itself. And the texture of the cotton thread is spoiling the softness of the bamboo thread,creating a thin, scratchy, stiff line on the edge. Something I'm sure a baby's tiny soft fingers will notice and pick at push obsessively away from his face.

As I type this I'm beginning to accept I have no choice but to pull out the fringe and resort to a crocheted border. Two things hold be up though. One is my attachment to the idea of the fringe. I love it's look and feel which matched my expectation of it from the beginning of the project. I hate to let go of the dream of it. But that is easier to get past than the second problem: What to do with the tails from the row work that are tucked into each fringe piece. 155 of them and already trimmed to match the one inch fringe. Thus they are no longer long enough to work into the fabric and I fear the very slipperiness of the thread that is causing the difficulty with the fringe will lead to the row work unraveling.

Oh and a third issue: what to do with the hundreds of two inch threads I cut for the fringe--enough to do both sides. I'm obviously never going to try to fringe with the bamboo thread again.