Today at 4:44 pm EST, it was not entirely clear to me that I would both finish work on all of the squares and get them photographed.

Earlier in the day I had finished work on the the six squares pictured in the photo below. They are from left to right and top to bottom Square 49, Square 76, Square 7, Square 82, Square 62, and Square 93:

While I could have, at that point, called it a day and begun the work of laying out and photographing the 101 squares as they appear in Jean Leinhauser’s book 101 Crochet Squares, Square 22 was eating at me.

I had originally crocheted it in one color as it appears in the book:

But as I began looking over all of the squares, I felt that my first Square 22 my best work. The details of the design were lost rather than highlighted by the use of one color.

Unable to shake the sense that I had not done my best work, I grabbed my hook and my seven luckiest colors and got to work.

Thankful for the now lengthening days, I raced against sunset finished a second version of Square 22:

with just enough daylight left to take photos of all 101 squares in the order and general arrangement in which they appear in the book:

I have learned a lot from this exercise of crocheting every square in the book.

Had I been left to my own devices, I would, no doubt, have elected to work only on the squares that I thought that “I liked.”

By working each of the squares in the book, I did not need to make any judgements about whether I liked a particular square or how I would use it, I just needed to figure out how to make it, and more than once I discovered some new crochet “tool” that I could add to my crochet “tool box” as a result of having worked a square.

Toward the end of the musical “Wicked” the characters of Elphaba and Glinda reflect on their friendship, noting that “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better, but because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”

While don’t yet know how working the 101 crochet squares has changed me, I trust that it is both for the better and for good.