After a week spent in what seemed like the crochet equivalent of spinning one’s wheels in the mud, today I felt as though I finally began to get some traction on my projects.

I currently have three projects I am focused on finishing: a belated birthday rug for my oldest son, a go-go granny dress for myself, and a cat-runner for the back of my sofa so that the cat has a blanket of her own where she can sit, preen, and shed copious amounts of hair.

Most of my crochet time today was spent on the future cat runner.

Inspired by the well-known (at least in crochet circles) Babette Blanket, I had made 2 sets of 56 squares (for a total of 112) from 8 different colors of yarns. Once I had the needed squares, there were still questions to be answered, the first of which was “How will I join the square?”

This past week (after 90 minutes or so experimenting with various joining techniques), I settled on a “right sides together with a slip stitch through the back loops only of the stitches on the squares being joined” joining.

Having answered the first question I could finally begin to put the pieces together.

Or so I thought.

What I learned was that I could begin to put the pieces together once I decided how I would order them; when I got to the second row, I got bogged down in the process of deciding.

After having spent 90 minutes agonizing over which squares I would use and how I would arrange them in the second row, I realized that I had to streamline my decision making process. To that end, I sorted the remaining squares into 16 piles, by outer color and number or rounds of the outer color.

Instead of the series of complicated, and at times incomprehensible, notes I had been making, instead, I switched to a largely visual manner of placing the pieces. The organization of the squares by the color makes it quick and easy for me to locate a specific square I want to try.

This has not eliminated my agonizing, but it has made it much more efficient. As such, I was able layout two additional rows, join the squares of each of those rows as well as join row 1 to row 2 and row 3 to row 4.

Here is how the front of it looks after joining four rows into two groups of two rows each:

As you can see, I did not weave in the ends:

Once I join row 3 to row 4, weaving in the ends on this cat runner will be the perfect project for all those times I need something portable to work on.