In the interest of making progress on my “almost ready for prime time” crochet hot air balloon yarn bomb, I made a decision to work two of the balloons in a solid color, and while the reason was dictated primarily by how much time is left to get this done, it has also turned out to be a fortuitous design decision.

Yesterday, before I went to bed, I finished work on the red, white, and blue hot air balloon crochet panel:

I loved the way it turned out, but the design necessitated a lot of extra stopping, starting, and end tying.

So when I got up this morning with two panels in need of a total of 60 rows of double crochet stitches, I decided that as much as I liked the fancier designs, I needed something simpler, so I decided to go with solid colors. I worked the first one using one of the skeins of grenadine that I recently purchased.

I loved it.

But even when that was done, I still had more panel to finish. I thought a solid green would not pop as much as I would like it to against the blue, I didn’t have enough of any orange yarn handy, and as I had already worked one in grenadine, I decided not to do a second one in pink.

I did, however, have a skein of Red Heart Super Saffron in the trunk of my car, and once I retrieved that, I quickly made progress on the fourth and final panel:

And not only did that fourth and final panel coordinate nicely with the grenadine:

It also helped set off the design of the two “fancier” crochet balloon panels:

And now that I have the fourth panel well under way with no design decisions left to make, I can crochet both late into the night and early in the morning, so that when the sun finally rises on the new day, I can be ready to install a brand new yarn bomb.