Oh, right

Y'know, this week when I started back in on the "Muppet Roadkill" blanket project I talked about in my last post, I thought it was awfully odd that, even though I had decided five years ago that the edging across the top was puckering so badly that I would have to go back and redo it with more rows added in, I had still done the entire top edge, gone round the corner, and started down the third side. Why on earth would I have kept going on an edging if two thirds of it was going to have to be ripped out, I wondered.

Well, now I have my answer.

See how the edging goes aaallll the way around three sides of the blanket (the pattern dictates that the fourth side doesn't need an edging, as it is already nicely scalloped from the ripples in the main blanket pattern), stopping short just four lousy repeats from the end?

Yeah. That would be where MY YARN RAN OUT.

(And yes, I am fully aware that you can see the final yarn ball change at the top of the blanket as clear as day. Apparently, one of the yarn balls we had bought for the blanket was either a radically different dyelot or a completely different colourway to the others, and I didn't notice until it was too late because balled up, all the yarn looked completely identical. At the time, DD1 maintained she didn't care. I am fervently hoping she still doesn't.)

So it turns out that, five years ago, I realised my top edge was too tight, but also realised that the amount of yarn I had might not be enough to insert too many additional edging repeats into the top edge. And apparently what I decided to do was to knit until the yarn gave out; see from there exactly how many more repeats I could insert into the top without running out of yarn at the end; and then rip back to the beginning of the top and redo the top and the third side.

As it happens, though, even this wouldn't have worked - I added three more repeats to the top and ended up four repeats short of my goal, which means that I would have run out of yarn even if I never fixed the puckering at the top.

So, what to do, what to do.

Possible strategies:

Go back to the store and get more yarn.

I can't tell you how much I hate this plan, even assuming the store actually still carries the stuff. I don't like the yarn. I therefore don't want to buy more when all I need is about eight more grams of it. Although...maybe I could gift the extra 42 grams to DD1 as an additional birthday present. She would love it. Hmm...

Stash dive to try and find eight grams of something else vaguely substitutable

Fabulous plan...but I'm pretty aware of what's in my stash, and I don't think I'm going to get any joy there. Worth a shot, though. I'll take a look.

Rip the entire edging back and redo it using a slightly different edging which eats slightly less yarn

Sadly, this is looking (at least to my brain) like the best option. I could do the math and come up with something which would give me almost no yarn left over, which means I could say good-bye to it FOREVER. The downside, of course, is that I would have to do almost 900 rows of edging all. over. again.

If you have any additional ideas I haven't thought of yet, feel free to weigh in!

(In better news, my third pattern submission of the year is practically all ready to go...I just need the issue I have in mind for it to start being open to submissions.)