Crochet Kick

About a week ago, on June 13, I started this afghan. Today it's about half done.

The pattern is Chocolate Box from 200 Crochet Blocks by Jan Eaton. It's called Chocolate Box because of the colors she used in the book, browns and tans.

The yarn I'm using here was given to me by my friend Darija. It was from her late mother's stash, which really was huge. I only took a portion of it, about half, and it just about doubled my stash.

This yarn is very fine cotton, almost like crochet thread for doilies:
I had started making a hexagons afghan, with the yarn held double on a size G hook. It was taking forever. Each hexagon is about 3 inches across and takes me about half an hour to make. I was losing patience. So I decided to make the giant Chocolate Box square using the hot colors in the center and the cool colors on the outside, with a black border all around. Darija's mother had like 20 balls of black cotton yarn.

I used a size K hook, with 2 strands of 2 colors together, for a total of 4 strands. The variations in color are pretty interesting that way. It's going so much faster now. In the picture at top, I'm just about done with the purple. If you look closely, you'll see that I've run out of one color and had to substitute another, but with so many colors going on, I don't think it'll matter. For example, the purple on the outermost left is different from the purple on the right.

My plan is to do a diamond in a square. Once the hot colors are done, I'll use the cool colors to crochet on triangles. I don't have pattern or instructions on how to do it, but I think I've figured out a way.

The nice thing about crochet is, you can rip out stitches and redo pretty easily. And crochet is so fast and uses up so much yarn. It's entirely possible that I'll have this done by July 4 weekend to show to all of Husband's relatives who are coming to visit. Ultimately though, I plan to give it to Darija as an appreciation gift and a way to memorialize her mother.