As my regular readers know, I have taken a hiatus from my 2017 North Carolina State Fair project so that I can work on and contribute panels to the Love Across the USA crochet installation that is being done in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The idea — which is the brainchild of the artist known as Olek — is a very organized kind of yarn bombing, with each element of the project having a very specific design to be followed.

Each panel is a sort of mosaic of double crochet stitches (2 dc constitute a crochet “tile” of sorts), and then those panels are joined to form a much larger mosaic, the pieces of which, when assembled, are made into something much larger than the sum of it’s pieces.(You can learn more about the techniques employed here).

With one panel that I signed on to do completed:

and three in medias res, I am reminded of why I like to work in so many colors.

While I find the overall design thrilling, I find the extensive use of just three colors more of a challenge than the projects I design which sometimes have several thousand ends to weave in.

But I signed on for what I signed on for, and since I don’t know yet what I will be learning from all of this, I continue to work one double crochet and then another.

Because the black panel (pattern 23 of the overall project) is more easily transported, and because I was able to stay home much of this weekend, I did not do a lot of work on it, and instead focused on two less portable panels, namely panels 32:

and panel 31:

And while I am working these panels of double crochet, I am beginning to get ideas for how I can use this technique in my own work, but in the meantime I will move forward as I always do; one stitch at a time.