As anyone who has ever had to go on a road trip (or crosstown errand) with me knows, I think that there is a song for everything, and as I worked on the crochet balloon panels for my front burner yarn bomb, I was reminded of the Fifth Dimension’s hit from 1967, Up, Up and Away.

And it was with that song in mind that I did my best to stay focused on the task at hand and let my fingers do the work they were itching to do.

My goal was to finish the first eighteen rows of all four forty-eight row panels.

The reasons for this were two fold:

One, once I have eighteen rows done, what are thirty more? With that kind of a commitment already made, there is no reason not to stay up late (if need be), and plow forward

Two, getting the more perfunctory and less creative work done first. means that the more creative color work is what’s left, and that makes it easier to stay up late (if need by), and plow forward.

By early afternoon, I had reached my first goal:

With four crochet balloon baskets on deck, I looked over the array of designs I had come up with and got to work. However, since the designs were originally intended for a square that was 40 stitches wide and 24 rows high, I made some adjustments to the original design, and by the time I needed to wrap things up for the day, I had gotten this far with the first balloon:

Obviously, there is some work still to be done, but now that I am to the “fun part,” I am confident that I will have it up on Saturday, and if you want to design your own yarn bomb, I have put together this piece on how to crochet the panels, and you can give the technique a crochet test drive.