Yesterday, I spent much of my designated “crochet time” remediating the metadata underlying some of my older blog posts.

It is a project I have been pursuing for over a year now, and while I have made progress, there is still plenty to do as I had over 1700 blog posts with several thousands photos in need of various degrees of remediation when I began the project.

While it is not a task I usually enjoy, I did get sucked into a metadata vortex of sorts, and it wasn’t until fairly late in the day that I emerged with my crochet hook and some squares in need of their own remediation.

One of the squares had begun its life as Crochet Square 82 from a crochet-along I participated in with Jean Leinhauser’s 101 Crochet Squares, and the other was a garden variety granny square, the particulars of which I no longer recall.

I made the first square squarer, and I filled out the send with a round of single crochet stitches in yellow. Here they are side-by-side:

Today, an onslaught of errands picked up where the metadata remediation left off, but shortly after noon, I made it home in time to have a couple of hours to devote to my crochet.

My goal was to turn this 3.5″ x 7″ rectangle composed of two crochet heart graphic granny squares (a design I came up with in the wake of working on Olek’s Raleigh, North Carolina installation) into a seven-inch square:

But as I was in charge of the project, there was a detour.

Inspired by the memories of a small, round puzzle decorated with smiling hearts that I had gotten at a shop in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco after dinner at Señor Pico’s with my parents and an aunt an and uncle circa 1968, I decided I wanted to use colors that would better evoke the spirit of that puzzle.

Using red, and pink (two of the most prominent colors in the puzzle), I decided to add orange and yellow, which were not colors in the puzzle, but do, for me, evoke the feelings that I had (and continue to have) about that particular puzzle, Señor Pico’s, Ghirardelli Square, and going to dinner in San Francisco.

So I ended up starting what will be a new four heart granny square square by frogging one of the squares all the way back to the “heart”:

Then, after trying out several color arrangements on paper and then in crochet I finally settled on this:

I had no idea what color I wanted to use for the joining, and that daylight available before I needed to head out on more errands was not enough for me to work through all of the options and doubts.

But tomorrow is a new day, and I have several ideas of what might work, and with hook in hand and yarn at my side, I will try all of them — if necessary.

And if you want to make your own graphic heart granny squares, here is the video I made of how to do it: