Holy Half-Treble Crochet Batman!

Now I know why crochet is traditionally viewed as an old person's pastime.  It takes a really, really, really long time to complete anything.  You may be young(ish) when you start a project but by the time you actually finish it, you are 85.

Trawling the internet for ideas on my first crochet project ever, I could have picked any number of simple projects.  A granny square.  Pfft, challenge me!  A scarf.  No thanks.  Then I saw it - a gorgeous flower crochet blanket, yes, that's right, a B-L-A-N-K-E-T.  How hard could it possibly be??  I had a pattern, and if parts of it were tricky to follow, I had the internet to decipher the abbreviations, right?  Online crochet tutorials make the craft look so deceptively simple!

Project size aside, there are lots of traps for a novice crocheter to watch out for and I think I fell into them all.  Go me!  Firstly, I chose the wrong gauge yarn for the size of the hook I was using, so the squares are quite dense. Four squares and one snapped crochet hook into the process, that single granny square project was looking pretty good to me.  I realized then that my grand dream of an heirloom blanket would now be downsized to a very small cushion.

Here's a glimpse of what I have done so far:

I lost track of where I was on the pattern a few times and missed stitches, so I had to unravel a number of flowers and start again.  Weaving in the ends of the yarn was also a mission!  I had cut a number of ends too short which made the job harder than it needed to be.  That job is best done as you go rather than at the very end as the sight of all those brightly coloured tails taunting me left me overwhelmed at the amount of work still left to do and nearly made me throw the whole thing away. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.

When I have finished the cushion, I will post an update along with a link to the pattern I used for anyone who wants to try it.