The view from my house today was rather dreary:

By mid-morning, a persistent rain had begun to fall, and while it was not torrential, it was enough to dampen everything and give the day a decidedly gray cast; the high temperature of the day topped out in the upper forties, giving the day a bone-chilling edge.

I, for my part, stayed indoors as much as possible and continued work on the project that has currently captured my imagination: a blanket for the now two-year-old child of a friend from college.

The child in question is a boy, and having amassed an ample stash over the now fourteen years I have been crocheting, I have scoured the depth (and breadth) of my yarn holdings for every shade of acrylic worsted weight blue I can find, searching every nook and cranny for any yarn that I can use in this project.

There are vintage blues, new blues, green blues, gray blues, dark blues, light blues and every shade and hue of blue that I can find in the bins, bags, and baskets that house my vast, and not always well-organized, stash.

Despite my less-than-perfect organizing strategies, I have been able to unearth a number of blues, and then seem (at least to my eye) to work together, and today I continued to make more of the Royal Sisters Nana Square that I began work on yesterday.

Here are some of yesterday’s squares mingling with today’s squares:

and here is a strip (9 squares wide so far) of squares joined using a regular whipstitch through both loops of both squares:

and here is the pieced strip with the other squares that have been completed so far:

I am curious to see this blanket evolve from separate and discrete pieces to a unified whole, and in crochet, as with much of life, the whole is often much more than the sum of its parts.