Piecework

Today I worked on the Tetrisghan for every minute that I could, and while I did not crochet even one single stitch, I did make tremendous progress on the piecework.

Instead of making any new pieces, I concentrated my efforts on assembling the crochet tetriminos I had already made.

Here was the crochet tetrimino count as of sunset last night:

crochet tetrominos
My supply of crochet tetrominos ready for assembly shrinks

and here is the crochet tetrimino count just 24 hours later:

crochet tetrominos
Crochet tetriminos at sunset, April 16, 2013

The work involved in getting from one sunset to the next was both arduous and meditative.

In making the crochet Bauhaus blocks that are the basis of the crochet tetriminos, I made sure to leave ample lengths of yarn at either end so that I would be able to use those lengths to make the row of slip stitches across the top on either side of the crochet block and to join the squares, one to the other.

It turns out that I overestimated how long those initial ends needed to be, and because of that, the back of the Tetrisghan had an “If Jackson Pollock crocheted” flair to it:

ends ready for trimming
The back of the Tetrisghan to be with many ends woven in and in need of trimming

Over the course of my crochet day, I had woven in many of the ends, but not all of them, so I worked slowly and deliberately with my scissors, careful to separate the as-yet-not-woven-in-ends from the ends that were ready to be trimmed.

After almost fifteen minutes of trimming ends, I had this pile of yarn scraps ready to be used in a future project:

yarn scraps
The resulting yarn scrap pile

As a bonus, not only did the back of the Tetrisghan-to-be look much tidier:

crochet weaving in ends
The back of the Tetrisghan with a couple of hundred of the ends trimmed

the front of the project looked less overrun as well:

tetris crochet blanket
I nearly complete the first 14 rows of one panel of the Tetrisghan

I don’t know that tomorrow will provide me the same opportunity to make the sort of progress I did today, but I will do what I can to translate the day’s crochet momentum into more crochet Bauhaus blocks that I can use to make more crochet tetriminos which can then be assembled into Tetrisghan, working as I always do: one stitch at a time.