I consider my congenital carelessness to be one of my more annoying personal characteristics. As a child and young adult, I was constantly losing things or breaking them because of my untidiness, or falling short of my own expectations because of failing to read things properly. Careless has caused me to lose friendships too, misplacing peoples’ addresses and contact details and then being unable to contact them to explain how embarrassed I am.

Given how much ag this has caused me I now aim to pre-empt my carelessness, stalk it and destroy before it causes me any more annoyance.

Combine this with congenital crack-handedness and an attempt at releasing my pent-up creativity through crochet and, well, the prospects for making something wonderful aren’t great, are they? How I long to get a piece of knitting or crochet right first time without having to unpick it. Usually I have resigned myself in the first few days of work to being unable to fix a hole that has happened because, without looking carefully, I knitted a row instead of purling, and saying, “Well, nobody’s perfect!” In a way, it’s the very opposite of kintsugi: I take something that’s perfectly good and ruin it.

So it goes with my latest project, you know the project I started despite already having 4 wips, @TinnaHekl’s Havana blanket, my first major attempt at mosaic crochet.

I started off assiduously following both written pattern and chart, congratulating myself at counting 183 chains for the foundation row and getting the first iteration of the first pattern right first time. Except for one mistake, which you wouldn’t notice unless you looked closely, and no-one’s going to look that closely, are they? The first pattern looks complicated but it’s really not as long as you follow and read.

Naturally on the first repeat, I’d become used to the maths behind the SCs and DCs and so I thought I knew the simple pattern so well that I didn’t need to look at it, with the result that I ended up crocheting a little triangle of extra stitches at the end of all 12 rows of this repeat. I knew something was wrong when I found myself pulling at the knot to make extra stitches, and the finishing border didn’t look as neat as the start but I thought I’d rectified it by adding an extra stitch. How very wrong.

When I held up the blanket proudly at the end of the first pattern repeat it looked, well, a bit too pointy. Finally turning to the chart that had been there all along for me to look at if I’d only been a little less arrogant, I quickly realised what I’d done wrong, felt the flush of burning shame and decided to rectify it. After all, one of the attractions of crochet is that it’s much easier to undo and redo than knitting. Isn’t it?

Well, four hours later, at almost 1am I was still there. It turns out that pulling at rows of crochet willy-nilly in the expectation that they’d just unhook themselves obediently was the wrong thing to do, especially as, in my haste to complete the first iteration of the pattern last week, I’d stabbed my hook wildly though loops on several rows, splitting the yarn, and thus making the hand-kettled dyed merino wool harder to untangle, fuzzier and more knotty.

I have often find myself wondering what the woman on the other side of the world who hand-dyed this yarn was thinking as she made this. How did Elma or Famma or Leticia or any of the others decide which colour to place where? What would they have thought if they’d seen tangled, fuzzy sow’s ear that lay in my lap? I couldn’t bear to betray Fatima and leave it like that. By nature a worrier, I would have lain in bed fretting about leaving my frizzy-haired crochet in that state and whether the elves that come out at night and tangle up the wires on your electronic gadgets would view this as an extra-special LOL.

So, as I believe in facing the consequences of my actions, up I stayed, painstakingly unknotting all the tiny little knots – how on earth did they get as bad as that – and unwinding the rows one by one, injuring myself with my fingernails in the process. I’m not generally known for my patience. I’m more likely to fling a piece of knitting across the room and pout than spend hours untangling knots – so this was a character-building feat of endurance for me.

When my eyes started hallucinating the yarn ends upside down, it was time to go to bed but I was work early to finish the last frogging and recrochet the ends of 14 rows. And here we have the result of all that work. It’s a bit fuzzier than it should be but you (almost) wouldn’t notice that anything had gone wrong. But I have learned a lesson in perseverance and following instructions and not being so ruddy Dunning-Kruger. There’s a lesson in everything if you just loook carefully.