Sunday Serenity #303

Strummed me some strings today.

Have now completed 20 of the 99 squares including all 11 in one of the 9 strips.  Have completed all but two of the first squares of each strip and those two are well begun which means I've settled on all 9 stitch patterns, tested them for gauge and doability.

This means the design stage of this project is nearly over and that seems to be a dangerous stage for projects I begin.  I tend to loose interest after all of the creative decisions are made and it starts to feel like a long stretch of tedious stitching 'by the book' even when as in this case 'the book' was 'written' by me.

I'm just going to have keep the vision of the finished bag fresh and living in my imagination to keep the desire to see it realized strong enough to keep me going for the next three months.

The last few days of work on it have been frustrating because so many stitches had to be taken out or as in one case reassigned to another project (I turned one partial square into a bow to decorated another project after deciding the stitch pattern wasn't gauging right and I needed to start it over.

In another case (the wavy aqua seen in the pic above) I had the square nearly to the halfway mark and had to take it completely out because not only was the gauge wrong but I'd made some egregious errors on the first and third rows that were being built on by the rows above and magnifying.  It was a mess.  I had to make adjustments in the pattern to get the gauge right and that took some math and a lot of trial and error.  Read ripping out stitches.

Yesterday while working on the strip that uses two colors (the coral and brown in the pic) I got a knot in the coral thread and in trying to get it out with a needle I split the thread and dropped the work and in picking it up somehow pulled the work through the split.  After spending three hours trying to untangle that, I gave up and pulled out all of the coral above the brown and then all of the brown in order to get the brown thread out of the snarl.  After that I was able to get the knot out of the coral and even repair the split thread which had not broken.

Those two squares are the only ones still not finished.  Later this week--probably Thursday, I hope to post a pic showing each of the 9 beginning squares complete to showcase the 9 stitches.

I may have to take it easy with the hook for a day or two as my right arm from wrist to neck feels like one giant toothache.  Not stop just pull back.  Keep the one square per day pace by doing one of the easy ones and maybe a couple of rounds on the Mobius strip which has been neglected the last three days.