Yesterday, I went into the room known as the “crochet empire” in search of seven-inch crochet squares, and as fate would have it, not only did I find some seven-inch squares, I also came across one six-inch square, one 3.5 inch square, and several, close — but not quite — five inch squares.

This morning, with the good light of a new day, I got to work transforming the squares from the sizes they were to the sizes I needed.

First up was this not-quite five-inch even if you stretched it square:

I had a suspicion that it might look very good with what little Red Heart Super Saver Accents paradise I have left, but as it is (to my horror) a discontinued color, I use it only sparingly and with great thought. After getting it out in the light of day, I decided that square was paradise worthy, and I quickly crocheted another round of single crochet stitches.

To my delight it looked as least as good as I had thought it would, with a subtle, but identifiable shift in color:

Among the other things I had found while foraging for seven-inch squares was a crochet circle left over from my 2006 (yes, you read that correctly) North Carolina State Fair entry. The design won at the state fair, and eventually, I sold it to Red Heart Yarns where they named it the Crochet Circles Throw, and last night while I was looking for squares, I found a long-forgotten crochet circle which I quickly transformed into a five-inch square using a 5.0 mm hook and some grape fizz yarn. (It can be seen in the upper left-hand corner of this photo)

From there, I resumed work on the square pictured in the lower left hand color of this photo:

The square in the upper right-hand corner had been exactly the right size, but the one in the lower left-hand corner had been 3.5″ the last round of which was single crochet. I had frogged it back to the double crochet stitches and then resumed work.

It wasn’t an easy fit for a 5″ square, and so I just kept going, and it turned out that two more rounds of double crochet stitches and a final round of half double crochet stitches made it a six-inch square, which meant I could then turn my attention to the seven and nearly seven-inch squares I had gathered.

I haven’t figured out how I am going to piece them together, and I am hopeful that tomorrow’s crochet mining will lead me to even more squares, but in the meantime, I made this video to show you how I squared off the crochet circle, because it is a technique that is a very easy way to add texture and surface interest to your crochet