Once upon a time, way back in 2013 I decided I wanted to be a crochet designer. I had already been crocheting for a while, but I had been making projects designed by others. It was time to strike out on my own.

My crochet journey can best be illustrated as an exponential chart. The line starts out at the very bottom when my dear friend taught me the basics. The line slowly starts in incline as I consumed every (outdated) book on crochet my public library offered. It then inclined a bit more as I started to buy newer books with trendier projects and stitch dictionaries. And then my crochet skills finally hit that exponential spike, the line skewing straight up when I joined Pinterest and was exposed to limitless patterns and tutorials.

It was at that time, the time after I spent a while on Pinterest, discovering the joys of blogging and Etsy, that I decided to try my hand at designing and selling and blogging myself. I sketched out an afghan design; colorful blocks in deliciously textured stitches framed in white. Something modern and fun.

I raced off to my local craft store and selected the yarn and began furiously working on the eight panels that would make up the body of the afghan. I finished them but soon realized I didn’t have the skills to join them. Pinterest was still just gaining popularity so the number of joining tutorials were limited and I was very inexperienced at afghan making, this only being my second one ever. As much as my skills had grown I didn’t really know how to join the panels in the way I had envisioned it in my head. I didn’t want to sew them and my attempts and joining them with crochet were’t going according to plan. Frustrated, I packed the panels away.

I was a nomad as a young adult so they sat in my parents’ shed while I traveled around the world for work. The panels finally made it back to me after marriage and all my things were moved into our house, but they still sat untouched in my craft closet. Until a few days ago.

It was time to clean out my cluttered craft closet and I was certain I was going to frog the panels and use the yarn for something else. I threw them in the frog pile, but when it came time to pull them apart, I realized I knew how I could finish the blanket! I was ecstatic!

I worked a series of granny squares around the panels, joining as I went, and six years after starting it I finally finished it. From a nostalgic standpoint, it is positively perfect. From a design standpoint, it is still heavily flawed. Now that my skills have improved a hundredfold from when I began I’d like to tackle this project again and create a newer, better version and share the pattern with all of you. I have a few things in the works before I tackle that, but keep your eye out.

Do you have any projects that benefited from time away?