I worked on the afghan-that-has-eluded-me today.

I started piecing together the strip to the left of the central squares, and this is as far as I got:

This was in part due to the fact that I redid the last round of the square to the far right. The color I had initially used worked fine if the square were to stand alone, but in combination with the other squares, it fell a bit flat.

While I am not entirely dissatisfied with the piece, it is definitely outside my creative comfort zone, and I am curious to see how it will come out.

The method I elected to use to join the pieces (putting right sides together and making a single crochet through both loops of both squares) is not terribly forgiving of the fact that not all of the pieces are exactly the same size.

While the directions say to whipstitch the squares together, the joining method that was employed in the afghan depicted in the photo is a join-as-you-go method in which the squares are joined only at every 3rd stitch. This method more comfortably allows for the variation in square size than the method I am using does.

One suggestion that was made after I had already joined the central 12 squares and crocheted the borders around them was to join the squares by putting the wrong sides together and using a slip stitch or single crochet through both loops of both squares being joined. This would have minimized ruffling and made whatever vagaries there were part of the design, but by the time the suggestion was made, I was not of a mind to pull out all of the borders and seams and redo them.

Despite my discomfort and nervousness over how this project is going, I am glad to be challenging myself and look forward to finishing it. With the start of every new week, I think “this will be the week I finish,” and one of these weeks, I’ll be right.

Related post: Granny Square Sampler Afghan