We had some unseasonably warm weather today, and as a result, I spent most of it on the back deck working to finish some unfinished business.

I don’t remember everything I set out to do when I began work on the project that has evolved into what I now think of “The permutations cat runner,” but I do remember a couple of my goals.

One, I was going to use the granny square that formed the backbone of both Kathy Merrick’s very popular “Babette” and Inga Joana Mertens’ equally popular bag known simply as: Inga’s Häkelbeutel.

What I liked about this particular granny square is the way the corner spaces formed an additional design element that zigs and zags across the surface.

Another goal was to see what would happen if I took an arbitrary number of colors, and, using two colors for each square, made all of the mathematically possible permutations. I wanted a base number of colors that was both large enough and not too large.

I eventually settled on eight and used Red Heart Super Saver colors shocking pink, hot red, pumpkin, bright yellow, spring green, turqua, blue, and amethyst.

Once I had settled on the colors, it was simply a matter of making the squares in all of the possible permutations if one were to use two colors per square.

I made fifty-six squares with the first round in one color and the 2nd and 3rd rounds one other color; then I made fifty-six more squares, this time with the 1st and 2nd rounds worked in one color, and the 3rd round worked in a second color. When all was said and done, I had 112 squares.

But then I set the project aside, only to pick it up later.

In the meantime, squares were lost and remade. When I returned to it this time, I was impatient to get it done and did not notice until yesterday, that I had two identical squares and had joined both of them into the cat runner. There was no question that I wanted to preserve the organizing principle of the permutations, so today, I set out to remedy my oversight.

I started by removing the square in question:

and replacing it with a square that was different from any of the others:

I then laid out the 35 remaining squares and photographed the result so that even if I get everything that is not attached all mixed up, I have a visual record of my intent:

and spent what was left of the afternoon joining the squares in to rows:

Although it has only been three days, it seems like a lifetime ago that I began work on my most recent efforts to finish this project, and while don’t know how many days it will take me to crochet the last stitch and weave in the final end, when I do, I will have reduced the number of renegade pieces in my crochet empire by 49, and I will have a perfectly serviceable cat runner to put on the back of my sofa so that my cat may lounge and shed to her heart’s content.