Last night I started seaming the memorial afghan. It’s a big project with lots of unknowns, like how to combine a mish-mash of squares knit by 10 women, some with borders, some not, some too small, others too large. It’s the kind of dilemma instructions don’t address. Most afghan patterns offer this helpful tip: Sew squares together.
Okay. I’ll do that. I’ll seam all those disparate squares together as if it were the easiest thing in the world. I’ll sew the cats together while I’m at it. Easy as pie.
It’s like the novel, which has been written in dribs and drabs—nonsequential and (I fear) contradictory scenes spanning decades in my imaginary family’s life—scenes, which eventually must be stitched together into some kind of coherent whole. Yesterday I rounded the 75,000 word mark. I don’t know why the number matters, but it does. First time novelists on average must keep their books to between 80,000 and 100,000 words—long enough to justify the cost of a hardback, but short enough so publishers will risk the printing costs. Soon, I’ll reach the book’s end. But for the writer, and knitter, that’s just another beginning.
Sew squares together.
I suspect both endeavors will happen in fits and starts and require much improvisation.
As far as the afghan is concerned, I flaunted knitting orthodoxy and ironed my squares. Knit from that venerable workhorse, Plymouth Encore, the squares required serious intervention to make them behave. Wet blocking didn’t work. The Sunbeam Steamer proved futile. So I employed the heavy equipment, knowing full well that at 75 percent acrylic, the Encore squares might have shrink wrapped my dining room table once I applied heat. They didn’t. Instead, they flattened out like flapjacks.
To solve the border issue, I did a right-side-out crochet seam to delimit the squares. Once I had linked four squares, I picked up stitches along the horizontal edge, binding off knitwise to create a nice “even” ridge, to which I will attach the next row.
Remember that part about fits and starts…I’m thinking that crochet seam looks less like a “border” and more like an ugly seam. Opinions?
