Bye, Fire Square... Adventures in Frogging

The project you are about to see doesn't exist anymore.  Around a year ago, I decided to make an Avatar: The Last Airbender blanket because the show's cool, the blanket was cool, and what good is knowing how to crochet if you just make doilies all the time?  I finished one square out of the four required, the fire nation square, which incidentally, was probably the hardest one to start with.  It turned out looking like this:

Yes, it looks pretty awesome at first glance.  But I was not happy with it.  Not at all.  Firstly, the pattern suggests you pull the black yarn, which is inside every red stitch, taught as you work, so it doesn't peek out in the red sections as much.  Well, I wasn't as dutiful at the bottom of the square, where I began, as I was at the top.  So the bottom is much wider than the top, where I was pulling the stitches far tighter.

Secondly, the stitch the pattern told me to use for the black, the cluster stitch, was FAR too big for the single crochet I was using with the red, a problem only made worse by the fact the black yarn is fluffier than the red.  The result is the wrinkly-ness you see in the swirls.  Take a closer look.

Sloppy.  This thing clearly had to go.

So I decided to frog it.  Frogging is a knitting and crocheting term used when you unravel a piece in order to keep the perfectly good yarn.  I've heard it gets it's name because 'rip it' sounds like 'ribbit.'  Whether that's true, it's a painful process for any yarn-worker because you're ruining hours of work.

I'd been thinking about frogging this for months, so it wasn't too bad for me.  I'd come to terms with the fact that the only way I'd be happy with my fire square was to crochet it again.  So I got to work.

I wrapped the unraveled yarn around a chair to keep it from tangling.  I wouldn't suggest wrapping it as tightly as I did because it stretches your yarn out.  Whoops.

My roommate's cat was extremely interested in what I was doing.

You end up with lovely yarn-Ramen at the end.  I tied my first ball around the center, as in the top picture, but then realized it was better to tie both ends of the circle, so that's what I did for the others.  To get rid of the spaghetti-ness, I steamed the yarn with my steamer.

And that was that!  Now I'm ready to remake the fire square all over again.