With winter just around the corner, I have been working diligently to finish a granny square cardigan so that I can experience the joy of wearing it while the warmth it provides matches the cold of the outside, but the last couple of days I reached a crochet impasse of sorts.

While the sleeves of the future granny square cardigan mostly consist of what I think of as “crochet granny stripes,” each sleeve also has four three-round granny squares and two six-round granny squares, and trying to imagine how those multicolor squares would look with the parts of the sweater I had already crocheted was not easy for me.

Complicating things further, while I sometimes found colors that worked with the sweater, I did not always like how the squares looked together, but eventually, after more hours than I had budgeted, I finally had eight three-round squares I could live with:

Now all I had to do was finishing crocheting the third round of the fourth square of each strip, and voilà, I would be ready to move onto the next step!

Using the join-as-you-go method recommended by the designer, I got to work, and soon, I had both stripes joined into a sort of crochet cylinder. This is how one side looked

And this was how the other looked:

Now that I have finished crocheting these eight granny squares, all I have left to do is weave in the forty-eight ends that were generated making them, trim those ends (carefully), and figure out in what order and in what colors I will make the four six-round granny squares I need to make before I can move completely past a crochet impasse—one stitch at a time.