Procrastination, thy name is crochet!

You may or may not be aware that I am currently trying to write a ‘novel’. Notice the discrete use of the word ‘trying’ in there? Trying to write is very different to actually writing. Trying to write a novel, involves taking up crochet instead and subsequently embarking on a Lord of the Rings Director’s Cut Extended Edition With Bonus Extras-sized project in the shape of my Forever Blanket. Trying to write a novel also involves crocheting random gifts that I never give people and then starting a blog so I can bitch about how crocheting these random gifts is stopping me from finishing my Forever Blanket. And trying to write a novel now obviously involves bitching on this blog about how all this bitching on this blog is stopping me from finishing my Forever Blanket, NOT TO MENTION MY NOVEL. Yes, there are so many levels to my procrastination that it’s starting to sound like the plot for the next Christopher Nolan film… WHICH I MAY AS WELL START WRITING NOW INSTEAD OF MY FUCKING NOVEL.

You know… now that I think about it, my Forever Blanket and my novel are similar in many ways. For both projects, I have tools to track my progress: Scrivener tallies up my word count across multiple documents and my extremely-very-sad Excel Spreadsheet keeps track of my squares. Thanks to these tools, I know I am 150 squares into my 256 square blanket and 5,006 words into my 80,000 word novel. I find these numbers very assuring. They make me feel that maybe, just maybe, I might actually be making progress… until I realise that I still have ONE HUNDRED AND SIX FUCKING SQUARES still to make and I’ve only completed SIX GODDAMN PERCENT of my novel and that BOTH these targets completely and utterly FAIL to take into account that I STILL HAVE TO JOIN together those 256 squares and EDIT those 80-fucking-thousand words. It’s at this point that I calmly decide that my time would be much better spent crocheting everyone in the household ill-fitting fingerless gloves that they’ll lose within hours or never ever be seen dead wearing. You know it makes sense. 

My hand, modelling an ill-fitting fingerless glove, about to give myself a bitch-slap.

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Woolly, Madly, Deeply.

One of the key reasons why my Forever Blanket is taking fucking forever is that I keep crocheting gifts for people. Yes, I have become That Person who shows my love for people by crocheting things for them. 

However, more often than not, before I’ve even finished crocheting the gift, I’ve decided it’s beyond hideous and that the best way to show my love for people is by NOT sending them the things that I crochet for them. 

For example, I recently crocheted this lovely set of crocheted coasters for a very lovely friend in Ireland who has just turned 40.

Somewhere around the fourth coaster, I became almost paralysed by wool-based doubt: Would she actually use the coasters? Would she feel obliged to use them because I made them for her and would she grow to resent me over time? What kind of person uses crocheted coasters, anyway?? Moreover, what kind of person crochets crocheted coasters??  Would giving them to her send her a message that I think she’s the kind of person that uses crocheted coasters and reveal that actually, I’m the kind of person who crochets them and would this be the end of our friendship once and for all???

 

In the end, I concluded that my friend would most likely prefer me to post her a set of my turds than to receive a set of crocheted coasters. To date, neither coasters nor turds have been posted. Just so you know. 

I know, I know. This is really sad.

This is what happens when an administrator by day makes a 5-colour 256-square blanket by night:

 

Those of you who are really doing the maths will have noticed that I have only crocheted 5 more squares since I last posted about the Forever Blanket. Pray for me. 

Crocheted Anuses & Other Beginnings

It may come as a surprise to you that I only picked up a crochet hook for the first time in April this year. It’s now August. I’ll let you do the maths.

Of course, I didn’t call it a crochet hook back then. I called it a crochet ‘needle’.  And what I actually made with that needle could hardly be called crochet.

WTF?

Luckily, I persisted and soon branched out into crocheting small woollen anuses. At least that’s what my partner thought they were. In my defence, I was just trying to master The Magic Ring – a defence which, now I think about it, really didn’t help matters in the slightest.

I kept making anuses and granny squares trapeziums until this happened:

That’s gotta have hurt…

It was at this grave juncture that I pushed all talk of needles aside and bought a proper hook that must have been forged from the tears of angels, such was the gravity of its price tag.

Is it just me or does this thing look like it might double as a rectal thermometer?

And now here I am, [you do the maths] months later, 131 squares into a Forever Blanket and writing a craft blog. Let us pause for a moment while you go back and actually do the maths.

Of course, there may come a day where we all wish I’d kept my rectal hook and woollen anuses to myself. I’d like to think TODAY IS NOT THIS DAY (*charges, rectal hook drawn, towards the BlackGate with a whole heap of men with plaited beards*).

My ‘Forever Blanket’ is taking me fucking forever

This year, I embarked on a project: to make a queen-sized blanket for our bed – a ‘Forever Blanket’, if you will. I still remember how young and full of hope I was when I walked into Melbourne’s Morris & Sons that bright sunny day and bought ten balls of wool.

‘This will be enough’, I said to myself, and then “I’ll have it done in no time!”, followed by “Who knew it was even possible to spend that much money on wool?”  and finally “I really should destroy this receipt before someone sees it and knows my wool-based shame.”

Three decades and about $10,000 in wool later, I’m barely past the halfway point.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ‘FOREVER BLANKET’ PROJECT IN PHOTOS

Here is a photo to show the colour scheme I chose:

CLEARLY, I WANT TO BE CROCHETING A 1970s-STYLE BIKINI INSTEAD.

I took this next photo at a point where I thought twelve squares represented “a lot” in the world of squares.
WHAT A SOFT COCK I WAS.

After 95 squares, it made sense to decide to retro-add an additional round in brown to “make it easier to join together at the end”.
THIS IS WHEN I KNEW I WAS PLAYING THE LONG GAME, BITCHES.

This last photo shows what 131 squares looks like:
ACCORDING TO MY MOST RECENT CALCULATIONS, THE FOREVER BLANKET SHOULD BE READY IN TIME FOR ME TO BURIED IN IT.