Red Purl Afghan: Blocking and Assembly

I finished December's block this week and got the border knit on this morning.

I've also been working on blocking the other squares:
Half of them are done; I was waiting on the rest until I knit December's block so they'll all be done soon. The blocking worked its usual wonders and all the wonkiness has been transformed to straight edges and smooth lines. It's nice to see a nice set of actual squares come out.

To make things easy and consistent, I cut out a 12" square of cardboard to use as a template. I just laid it on the wet square and pinned it so the coloured center just showed around the cardboard. (So the center of the blocks are 12", but the whole block is larger because of the border.) Only the centers needed to be stretched or smoothed out because of the various stitches; the borders were already even.

Anyway, it worked pretty slick and I didn't have to worry about measuring and squaring up each block.

This Sunday we'll be putting them all together. I've been playing around with layouts:
I haven't quite decided yet, but it will have to be soon!

If I have time, I'll get started early because I think it's more seaming than I can do in one afternoon at the Purl. Most people knit the afghan in three strips of four blocks, so they only have to sew two seams. I, of course, didn't.

Now that we're at the end, this has given me a lot more flexibility in how to put it together, but certainly has left me with more work!

Trade-offs...