Plan D* Is Now In Effect**

So, last week as I was finishing up the 22nd green afghan square, I was rather surprised to find myself thinking, I am so over this afghan.

"What?" I asked.

I'm so over this afghan, I repeated.  Done, kaput, finished.

"But you love crocheting afghan squares!"  I asserted.  "Whatever happened to 'these are so compulsive I can't put them down'?"

That was before I made two afghans in the last six months.

I changed tack.  "But we only have 22 squares!" I protested. "That's not nearly enough to finish."

So? I'm still not making another 80 squares. Find something else to do with them.

"Like, what, a placemat?!"

Whatever.

Clearly, a crafting rebellion was in progress.

I mustered all of my goal-oriented-ness and pressed onward. "It could be a small afghan. " I scribbled a few numbers and discovered that 22 six-inch squares doesn't really make even a small afghan. "We've got to have more than 22 squares," I asserted firmly.

My brain deployed the big guns. We're almost out of the white we're using for the border, I pointed out. Buying the dark green was one thing, any leftovers can go into hats and mittens, but buying more pastels to use up the pastels we have, which we got because we were trying to get rid of pastels but didn't have enough for afghan number one and got more than we needed which didn't fit into afghan number two- which wasn't even part of the original plan, let alone a third afghan- that's dumb.

I had to admit I was right.

I started looking at the remaining yarn I wanted to use up. One more skein of light green, a large skein of yellow. I got the glimmering of an idea. "How about using the yellow as a big central panel, and then bordering it with the white and remaining light green, then using the dark green to fill in the space and making the smaller squares a border?" I suggested.

Much better.

So that's how I came to make a large shell-patterned yellow square for the center-- since it ran out of yarn as a square, I grudgingly made two more of the small squares (because 24 squares makes for a square border). And I used all the light green and most of the white, and am currently getting the central panel up to the size of the border. It'll finish approximately crib size, and I'm even pleased with how it's coming out.


But I'm still kind of worried by the whole rebellious thing.














*For those who have lost track of the plan mutations:
Plan A- make an afghan to use up existing pastels. Failed when I ran out of pastels before getting enough squares for an afghan.
Plan B- take additional pastels supplied by my mom, finish the first afghan, and use the remaining yarn to make a second. Failed when I found that many of the colors did not play nicely together. Finished second afghan without using up all pastels.
Plan C- started to crochet squares for the third afghan, this one mostly in shades of green. You just read how that went.
Plan D- the current plan, with small squares bordering the large central panel.

**And if you happen to be wondering if the title is deliberate, it is.  I've been rereading Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.  If you don't get the reference, don't worry about it- it's just a paraphrase of a book quote.