Note to my readers: This post was first published on February 8, 2011 under the title “If Frank Stella Crocheted.”

Sometime in the early aughties, when my youngest son was still small, and any traveling I did, I did with him glued to my hip, I went to hear a lecture at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The artist speaking was Thomas Sayre who had recently made and installed the piece “Gyre” in an outdoor space on the museum grounds. I sat in the lecture with my small, squirmy child for as long as was possible, but at some point, my son had exhausted his store of sit-still-and-listen-to-an-art-lecture behavior, and he and I went walking through the museum.

Here is a picture of the piece that was the subject of the lecture, provided by bobistraveling at flickr:

Once outside of the lecture hall, I walked my son for what felt like miles, and in the course of the walking we went past a Frank Stella piece. The piece caught my eye in part because it is huge and in part because the colors used reminded me, for all the world, of a crocheted scrap afghan.

More recently, I came across this Frank Stella piece online:

It is part of collection of art at the Canadian Embassy in the United States, and I couldn’t help but notice that it very much (to my crochet-centric mind) resembled a large, colorful granny square.

I spent most of Superbowl weekend working out the details of and beginning work on a crocheted piece inspired by the colorful concentric work of Mr. Stella. Drawing from my vast store of Red Heart Super Saver yarn in the colors I use most, I began to work on the piece.

By kickoff time for Superbowl XLV, I had gotten this far:

In the days that have followed I have added to it:

There is a lot of work left to do, and each round adds four additional 3dc clusters which doesn’t seem like a lot in the first 12 rounds or so, but adds up as I work my way out.

And while the arithmetic progression of this granny square is much less daunting than the geometric progressions of my hyperbolic planes, it still will require time, which I somehow never seem to have enough of.