The Great Afghan Square Sew-Up: Part 2

That first lot of squares is now a finished afghan. I didn't do anything fancy with it since the squares alone made a pretty good-sized blanket. I decided I wanted the cream on the edge instead of more green, so once everything was assembled, I just worked a row of dc and a row of sc around the edge. It's now been washed and dried, which did indeed soften it up a great deal, and I like it so much I'm going to use it on my bed this summer.

This afghan was crocheted together using a slip stitch. The advantage is that you can go from one side of the blanket to the other with one piece of yarn and not have to thread needles along the way. The disadvantage is that it leaves a definite ridge on the wrong side. I prefer doing it to sewing with a mattress stitch, but I'm not entirely sold on the way it looks in the end. So I'm continuing to explore and experiment.

With that project done, it was time to face the dungeon. I took my K-hook in hand and opened the cardboard boxes. To my great surprise neither one of them contained afghan squares. Instead they both contained yarn. Just what I was hoping to find! And in the bottom of the second one, there was a huge lot of black yarn, none of it with ball band, all of it looking a bit seedy. Definitely time to use it up and make it go away. The rest of the yarn got stuffed into other storage areas so I can get rid of the cardboard boxes (at least as soon as Bart is through with them) and I'll work at this from the box until what's left will fit in the black yarn drawer.

These two boxes do contain afghan squares. I'm pretty sure the bottom one is the lot that I thought was in the cardboard boxes. It's all sorted and bagged, so for now I'll let it be and focus on the top box. It turns out to also have at least 5 projects in it. Two are blankets that were started and abandoned for various reasons. Then there are 3 separate lots of granny squares. One lot is color coordinated, and was made from the leftovers from several blankets worth of knitted squares (we won't talk about those just now; they're in another box). They need to be joined with something color-coordinated, perhaps brown, so for now they're set aside. Of the remainder, one lot seems to have a row of black incorporated, and the other is done with alternating bands of one row of one color and two rows of the next. They even alternate whether they start with two rows the same or one. There's quite a lot of those, so that's what I'm going to start with.

The next question was how to join them. I know I want to work a row of black around each square, so that gives me an interesting option of joining as I go. The technique is demonstrated here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/90733686@N00/3470265079/in/set-72157617721257414/
The sample that I've tried seems to go quite easily and gives a join that is both flat and soft. So now I'm ready to head to the Big Easy Chair with my stack of squares, a skein of "mystery black," my K hook, a cup of coffee, and my current audiobook, Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I expect to come up for air sometime next week.