My intention for the new year (to finish more projects than I start), is finally starting to gain more traction.

Yesterday I finished a scarf that was made from some yarn that had been in my yarn empire just waiting to turn into a tangle.

Today, using my stash of Red Heart With Love I continued in my efforts to get caught up on the 101 Crochet Squares crochet-a-long I joined just over a year ago. With my copy of Jean Leinhauser’s compendium of marvelous squares at hand and a 5.0mm hook, I got to work.

I began with square 85.

For reasons I do not understand and cannot explain, I avoided working on this square from the week it was assigned. I don’t know what triggered this avoidance, but with the Red Heart With Love colors of lettuce and evergreen, I was able to finish the square in very short order. Here is the square:

Here is the shamrock embellishment:

and here is the square in all it’s completed glory:

Buoyed by a sense of accomplishment, I assembled the pieces of the daffodil for square 5 and then joined them to the foundation square.

I love the sculptural elements of square 5, and while I can’t figure out exactly how I would use this square in future projects, it is definitely something I would like to include.

With the shamrock and the daffodil completed, I then turned to square 6.

Rather than continuing with the monochrome, I added a touch of orange for the body of the butterfly to create a small bit of visual interest which I think worked reasonably well.

My last square of the day was square 92. Using this piece of fabric as a color guide,

I made some color changes to the original square. Not only did I use different colors, I altered their arrangement.

Most notably, I worked rounds 1-5 in one color instead of two. I decided to follow the example in the book, however, and use rounds 6 as an opportunity to create a frame for the square:

With the square finished, I then got to work on the cat. Rather than using black, I used a color from the With Love collection called mango:

And here is how it looked after I had finished with all of the detail work and appliqué:

I have made substantial forward progress on the crochet-a-long over the past two weeks, and it is my hope that the finishing mojo created by this adventure helps me to finish other non 101 Crochet Squares related projects.