Or at least it seemed that way. This is also a tale of me reinventing the wheel.

I wanted to create something significant for one of my closest friends, but none of my patterns seemed right. I stepped back and figured that I would eventually find an inspiration. A couple months later, while looking for something completely different in YouTube, I stumbled across a video demonstrating how to crochet fairly intricate Moroccan-themed octagons. This was exactly the inspiration I needed and I drew up a blanket layout with thirty-six octagons, plus adjoining squares and fill-in triangles, which I decided to do as granny squares, but with the same “X” stitches that the octagons had; I patted myself on the back for coming up with this additional touch that tied everything together.

This took more than a year. The many colours in this project meant that I was weaving in what seemed like thousands of ends (2,192 to be exact, before sewing everything together, which involved a lot ends-weaving, since merging octagons with squares is not exactly straightforward). I second-guessed my choices many times during this, but kept moving forward.

Here’s the punch line: there is already a pattern for this blanket! All that work figuring it out and for a few dollars I could have saved myself all that trouble. It’s located here:

https://www.janiecrow.com/persian-tiles.html

It’s a lot smaller than mine (sixteen octagons, rather than thirty-six) and is sold usually as part of a kit. But the pattern can be purchased separately. I found it on Ravelry as well and folks report that creating the original four-by-four version took them several months, so I don’t feel like such of a slacker that this took me so long.

I used worsted weight yarn and a 5mm hook.