Today, after I had attended to my morning chores and obligations, I started work on the African flower meditation.

I thought I knew exactly what colors I wanted to use and in what order, but as I worked my way through the motif, my idea about what constituted the perfect twenty-second African flower hexagon shifted; this hexagon was the end result:

and here is the meditation with the newly minted hexagon joined to the other 21 previously completed hexagons:

With my daily hexagon done, I turned my crochet efforts to one of the outstanding/overdue squares for the 101 Crochet Squares crochet-a-long.

I had long avoided square 91 (it was the weekly square 11 months ago), as I did not like some of the colors that were used in the exemplar, and I had not been able to think of suitable alternatives.

All that changed today.

I decided that instead of a pallid Santa head placed on an equally pallid green square, my square 91 would depict Santa after a week spent relaxing in Key West.

Using a 5.0 mm hook and Red Heart Super Saver paddy green, I started work on the square which began with these four loops:

Using Red Heart Super Saver bikini for contrast, I ended up with a square that I found both festive and vibrant:

Using the same 5.0 mm hook along with Red Heart Super Saver warm brown, soft white, bikini, and bright yellow I made the first of what ended up being two Santa heads:

As can be seen in the photo, the Santa head made with the 5.0 mm hook used for the square is a bit large and the stitch definition is less than awesome, so I got out my 4.5 mm hook, started over, and the end result was the right most Santa head in this photo:

and when the new, smaller head is placed on the square, it seems to fit much better:

I had thought that this square would go much more quickly than it did, but one thing that happens when you work your way through so many squares that you have never made before is that you will learn things whether or not you want to, and learning is always more time and labor intensive than already knowing how to do something.