A Stitch in Time, NOT

Barb gets very excited about her handicraft projects.  She set up her sewing machine in the dining room and has been working on a quilt that she brought from Canada.  She spends a lot of time talking to me about her sewing problems, showing me what she is doing and asking for my advice.  My usual practice is not to give advice, in case I get into trouble.  But sometimes I have to help her out with some kind of mathematical or geometrical problem.

Barb also likes to watch some television in the evenings and does some handiwork to keep her awake.  She found a crochet pattern on the internet that she thought looked neat.  It was sort of a patchwork blanket that involved crocheting little squares of the same pattern but with different colour combinations and then joining them together to make the whole blanket.

She started making the squares and was enjoying herself because they were turning out so well.  After she had made about 20 squares, she thought she should try to crochet some of them together. 

This was not as easy as it seemed.  The pattern on the internet was given in two parts.  One website for the doing the squares which was linked to another website for putting the squares together.  However, it was difficult to see how the two websites worked together.

Barb tried for two days to crochet the squares together, showing me the results.  She knew that it didn't look right.  She kept showing me and asking me what I thought.  I thought it didn't look right either but I thought she would eventually figure it out.

She kept trying and trying and she kept reading and rereading the websites.  She is very persistent. She couldn't figure out what was wrong.  She was gettting more and more frustrated as time went on that her attempts to crochet the blocks together didn't look like the pattern on the website. 

Finally, she got my attention and put the website pictures up on the television so that I could see them from my comfy, thinking chair.  We looked at them together and noticed that the squares were not actually the same size when they were being crocheted together.  We then found out how the smaller square needed to be finished while it was being connected to the larger square. 

After that Barb knew how to put the squares together and she started having fun again.  She showed me the new results and it looked perfect.

So I had done my usual non-helpful, helping.  She just had to get my attention and then she figured it out herself.  Of course, she thought that I had figured it out for her.  For the most part, I didn't know what she was talking about.  Really I didn't do anything.  I just happened to be talking to her when she figured it out herself.  That didn't stop her though from blaming me for not helping her earlier.  She said that I should have paid more attention to her problem for the past two days.  She said I knew how frustrated she was and I didn't do anything.  If I had helped her earlier, she wouldn't have wasted so much time and gotten so frustrated.  Sheesh.