L_O_N_G story!
In the fall of 1966, I was 20 and had moved into my mother’s house for the first time since age 11. She and my stepfather - quite rightly - wanted me to get a job. So I went job hunting. I took a job on an assembly line at the Emenee Toys in Flushing - about a 40 minute bus ride from my mother’s house in Jamaica. I hated the time ‘wasted’ riding the bus from one end of the line to almost the other end. With my first paycheck, I bought knitting needles and a box of yarn at Woolworth and that pattern book at a nearby yarn shop.
I was happy to knit my little squares on the bus ride and at lunch time every day. There was a problem though. My squares were too big, too tightly worked (think: stitches squeaking as pushed along the needle), and the fancier stitches - the lacy ones, cables, and travelling stitches - never looked quite like the ones in the photos in the book.

Of course, I imagined that I was doing something critically wrong. It never occurred to me to go the yarn shop and ask for help. My mother was a crocheter at that time; it was only decades later that I learned she also knitted, and by that time I’d solved my problems.

My problems were many. For starters, I worked much too tightly; I hadn’t yet managed to relax a little as I knit. My stitches really did squeak as I forced them from needle to needle! I had to fight to get the needle tip into the next stitch! Awful!
Then there was the way my grandmother had taught us (my mother and I) to purl. It was scooped from the left forefinger in a reverse wrap from the more usual way of working. Now, this is a fine and valid way of knitting, but only if you want to knit sturdy stockinette sweaters for your three Depression Era babies (as my grandmother did) or if you have been taught to work your stitches through their leading ‘leg’. I hadn’t been taught that, so all my bits of stockinette had alternating rows of twisted stitches. Working lace added even more twist in certain patterns. All that twisting served to distort my squares, and they didn’t look exactly like the photos.
After having studied the pile of 20 or so squares I’d made, I decided I improve my knitting skills before trying them again. So I put them and their planned yarns away and bought a book of very basic knitting patterns designed for teaching children to knit. I figured that I needed to re-learn to knit - not just knit from long ago and unwillingly given instructions from my grandmother, which I suspected I was misremembering.

Some years and many skeins of knitted yarn later, I tried again to make some squares and was equally unsuccessful. I put them away again, moved them with me to Montreal, and continued working my baby-steps program. Being in Montreal, I decided I needed to learn to work from French language patterns as well as English, so I bought two Mon Tricot 800 Stitches knitting dictionaries - one in each language. Somehow - maybe some neurologist could explain it - my brain understood some things faster from French than from English! One thing that I’d totally missed in skimming through the English version was way properly formed stitches ‘sit’ on the needles. I looked at what I did, and what was on the page and decided to relearn how to purl. Well, that did help. I was forced to knit more slowly and a tad more loosely, and I didn’t have any twisted stitches anymore, but my squares were still not working to gauge! Frustrated, I set them aside again, and continued churning out blankets, mittens, tuques, and scarves for my new spouse and our young children.

Time passed.

In October 1995, my mother announced her diagnosis of lung cancer, and I began shuttling back and forth between Montreal and NYC, whenever I could get a few consecutive days off, to try to help her and give a bit of respite to my youngest sister who’d moved back home to care for her parents. Part of the ‘helping’ was sorting through stacks of the parents’ collections of things that should have been discarded decades earlier. (Children of the Great Depression seem to have learned never to throw away anything that might possibly be of use in the future.) Eventually, my mother’s long abandoned knitting WIP surfaced - without needles or patterns. It was an enormous afghan worked in strips of assorted yarns with series of differently patterned squares; the strips had been joined, even though some were shorter than others. I took it home and filled in the gaps with variegated seed stitch blocks, and she got to use it in her last couple of months.

Then, in the clean-out of the house a year or so later, her needles and her pattern book turned up. Hers was a later edition of my pattern book (with a full hundred different stitches, not just 50!) http://www.purplekittyyarns.com/patternbook/bernhard34, but a few very crucial criteria had been changed. The gauge was bigger, the squares were bigger, and the needle sizes were bigger; the older book didn’t even suggest a second needle size for some squares. On a hunch, I tried knitting my squares with the bigger size needles. Whoopee! It worked! My squares came out to very close to the size required in the newer book. NOW they looked like the photos in the book and weren’t anywhere near as tight and stiff as they had been on the much smaller needles. I finally set out to complete the squares and had to rip out and re-knit most of the ones I’d done decades earlier - re-knit and add more yarn to each.

It seems that what was called ‘worsted weight’ yarn in the 1940s and 1950s was much, much thinner than what went by that name in the 1960s; no wonder my squares were stiff enough to stand alone and were impossibly bigger than called for!

Along the way, we bought a house and moved. Discombobulated is putting it mildly! Knitting took a back seat, and this poor afghan was delayed yet again with all the squares knitted and just waiting to be assembled.
In late January 2002, I stopped working; the offer was too good to refuse. I finally had the time to assemble my afghan! AND I had learned a method that is far superior (in my opinion) to the ‘sewing’ stated in the pattern. I had also learned to work mitred squares and used them to work a variegated yarn in an interesting border. In 2002, the assembly was completed. All that remained was the massive number of five-inch yarn tails to weave in - four per square, plus some for the joining and border. They will probably be done this weekend or next; Ginette is again playing at being my knitting angel! She even designed and did the initials in the ‘monogram’ square! She also took all those photos of it as it lay on her (immaculate!) kitchen floor.

Useful details of construction:

1. Each square is bordered with a single round of single crochet in white with 29 stitches on each side. This made assembly a cinch.
2. The center square is the 99th and is supposed to be embroidered with my monogram. If Ginette hadn’t done my initials, it never would have been done! The initials are JJI, and - to avoid having a specified end as the ‘top’, I asked her to do it twice. Either end is the top, and there’s no mistaking which way is the length.
3. Half the squares were made from the first batch of yarn I bought at Woolworths in 1966. I seem to like both flamboyant colours (very little of which shows in this project) and rather drab colours. That Olive drab isn’t quite as dull in person as it is in the photos. It glistens and has undertones of brightness and glints of gold-tone.
4. The rest of the squares were just whatever colours of worsted weight I had on hand, since my darling’s sweater had eaten up most of the other colour I had bought. (That is another longish story.)
5. The squares are not assembled as the pattern stated. I tried to space them according to their sizes, not their pattern number. Some draw in more than others, so I tried to place narrower ones next to fatter ones. That sturdy mitred squares border doesn’t hurt any either. Blocking to size is - in my opinion - out of the question. The yarn is acrylic, and no way will I allow even the coolest of irons to approach all that work! The lines of the joins may not be straight enough to win at a fair, but it’s warm just the same
6. They aren’t all facing in the same direction either. It just seemed to work out better with the olive drab ones being rotated ninety-degrees from the others.
7. It’s even larger than it would have been had I sewn the squares together. I’d rather not sew. In a way, it’s just as well I hadn’t finished it before discovering Priscilla Hewitt’s Flat Braid Joining Method. Also, I hadn’t any idea of mitred squares before the internet and the KnitList, where I first heard of them.

Will I ever do this pattern again? Well, I’ve already done it twice, so I doubt it. See the second iteration, and the rest of the story at: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/JessicaJean/sampler-afghan

Were I ever to do it again, I’d have to find another knitting angel; I couldn’t expect Ginette to do the lion’s share of weaving in of ends again!
The seventh from last photo is of it spread out on her couch. I was tempted to give it to her, but it’s the story of my progression from only knows-how-to-blindly-follow-directions and zero self-confidence to knows-how-to-change-those-directions to suit and the confidence to toss out directions I don’t like - like sewing the bits together.

2015-03-27 Finally, after decades of sporadic progress and a whole season on our bed (with all the ends still hanging out the backside if it), it has been washed! The last six photos are of it in all its cleanliness. In the last four photos, I shot from the top step of a small ladder and repositioned it so as to get most of each corner in the shot. The two before that were taken by my darling; he hadn’t understood that I wanted just a quarter in each shot and he’d tried to get the whole thing.

Maybe one summer, I’ll get a chance to do what I had first envisioned doing with it - spread it on a grassy bit in a park and have a picnic.