Over the past year I have learned a valuable lesson the hard way. Hopefully most crocheters don’t have to go through the pain of watching a project they worked hard on start coming apart because they didn’t weave the ends in well enough. That is what happened to my poor temperature blanket. I didn’t leave long enough tails, so even though I crocheted over them, as the articles and blog posts of instructions for C2C temperature blankets that I read suggested, many little holes had formed throughout the year as those little tails came unraveled and popped free from the squares they were woven into.
I already have always felt a little meh about the blanket ever since I discovered last fall that I had misunderstood the C2C instructions, so instead of each day having a consistent number of squares of one color indicating its high temperature, the last three months of the blanket have fewer and fewer squares representing each day, until the last few weeks are just one square per day. The blanket falling apart just made it worse, even though I have always been comforted knowing that if I had actually followed the instructions accurately, the blanket would have been too large to be functional anyway. It’s a perfect size as it is.
It took almost four painstaking hours of carefully sewing and knotting and weaving the tiny little ends back together. Often there was less than an inch to work with in a particular color. Sewing is my least favorite part of a project, so this was a task that has taken me months of mental prep to actually sit down and work on. Now that (most of, probably) the holes are secured, I’m back to being happy with the blanket (but I think I’ll never make a temperature blanket again!).