2021 Geek-A-Long: Week 1

There are too many squares. TOO MANY.

“How many?” you ask.

Well, let me tell you. After spending hours compiling them into a spreadsheet, because apparently I never thought to do such a thing over the past seven years, there are 289 Geek-A-Long squares. TWO HUNRED EIGHTY-NINE. The whole project is very daunting and is probably the reason why I kept putting the revamp on the back burner.

To be honest, the biggest reason why I’m buckling down and starting this endeavor this now — other than the fact that I promised you I would — is because Child’s Play Charity changed their donation platform last year, so every single link we’ve used in the patterns or those blog posts is broken now. Yep. That’s a big yikes. But, now I’m buckling down and getting it done. So, yay for me!

Also, in case you are wondering, the link in the blog sidebar is correct and so is this one!

This week, I only updated one pattern, the Caffeine Molecule. Creating the new pattern template took eons longer than I thought it would, and I forgot that we no long have the files for the 2014 or 2015 color charts, pictures, or PDFs anymore. I had to download them from my own website to recreate the new pattern. For shame!

I swear, I will never stop being angry that my laptop died on me years ago. This was before “the cloud” was a commonplace thing. If you made back-ups, it was onto USB drives and for some reason we never thought to do that with our GAL files. That probably explains why now I keep copies of everything on my computer, in Dropbox and OneDrive, and once a year I backup everything onto a terabyte drive. Some people say I’m over-cautious, but those people don’t know what it was like to find out my laptop was a brick and that what little I had backed up onto a USB drive had gone missing during a move.

Next week, I’m planning to update three patterns with similar themes, but from different years. However, I had to start this endeavor with the GAL square the began this wild adventure, the caffeine molecule! Download the revamped pattern by clicking the button below or read the original post where you can view it.

The Caffeine Molecule square pattern is near and dear to our hearts, it’s part of the reason why we chose to honor it in 2018 as a shawl. In that blog post, Megan-Anne talked a lot about what the Caffeine Molecule came to symbolize to us over the years, and I don’t think I can say it better than her. Read about it here.

For now, I bid thee farewell! I’m off to watch Bridgeton again while I pretend like I’m going to put away the Christmas stuff. I’ll definitely end up knitting instead.

~Jac

I mean, can you blame me?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider making a donation to Child’s Play Charity. Here is a direct link to our official donation page benefiting the charity. Please help us raise $1,000 this year. No contribution is too small! Wanna make your donation go even further? Lattes & Llamas will donate $1 for every skein of Geek-A-Long Yarn purchased.