While I have downsized my once über ample yarn stash over the past three years into a more moderately ample yarn stash, I still have a lot of yarn, and one of the risks a person runs when there is so much yarn around is that it will inspire them to start a new crochet project whether or not they need one, and with Valentine’s Day on the horizon, Sweethearts candy on the store shelves, and some yellow yarn in my line of vision, I was inspired to start work on a new yarn bomb.

At first, I tried to let the feeling go.

I thought that if I ignored it, it would go away, but the idea for a crochet heart yearn bomb based on a Valentine’s Day candy festered, and yesterday morning, when I could have been cleaning my closet or putting away the yellow yarn that was tempting me to start a new project, I instead got out my graph paper and worked on a yarn bomb design.

Soon, I had it done.

Well, sort of done.

Because I succumbed to the idea so close to the holiday, I knew that I would have to downsize my ambitions and make a 3′ x 3′ foot yarn bomb instead of a 4′ x 4′ yarn bomb. This meant that the center square of the three-by-three array would be all one color (in this case, yellow), and I would work on that while I finalized the design.

Which I did managed to do this afternoon:

The center square, however, took almost as much time as the design.

Despite being based on the crochet technique developed and perfected by the crocheter known as Olek and worked in one (count them–one) color, I managed to turn crocheting one 12″ x 12″ square into a four hour project.

It turns out that if you are going to crochet a square with 480 dc stitches on a foundation of 40 chains, there are a lot of ways to get it not quite right, and I felt as though I covered at least half of them.

But at some point, I finally finished not only the center square that bedeviled me, but I got a start on the square right under it which, thankfully, is going much more quickly:

Satisfied with how the individual panels were looking, I stepped back a little to see how they worked together, and it looked pretty good to my eye:

I have some work to get done between now and Friday morning, and I will work my way forward, one stitch at a time.