April 20, 2025

Last week and this weekend I finished all 64 of the pale yellow flower centers and I have the petals on 16 flowers. It actually used very little of the pale yellow. This coming week, as my after work project, I’ll try to get the remaining petals done to finish the flowers.

This morning I went around and found single skeins and scraps I had in reds, blues, greens, and pinks for the outer rounds. So next weekend I’ll start the joining process.

April 24, 2025

All flowers done! They were fun and repetitive in a satisfying way. They also gave me an opportunity to practice my standing DC w/o a slip knot technique which allows for working over the tail. I have roughly half in white and half in off white but I don’t think I’ll worry too much about how I distribute them in the layout.

(The yellow one in the picture is an extra one that I won’t need to use.)

April 26, 2025

I tried doing a slip stitch to the previous square join when doing the final, HDC cluster round and didn’t like the way it looked. The pattern recommends a flat slip stitch join, but I find that a little tedious. So, I ended up finding some yellow shades to use for 16 of the outer rounds so I can use the navy blue for an extra round to do as a continuous JAYG.

After joining the first 8 squares squares this way, it measured 58” across, so approximately 60” square (with an extra round of granny stitch all around for a border). That’s large, but I like the color distribution of the suggested layout so I’ll probably stick with it. Maybe this will become our picnic blanket.

I realized after joining the 8 that I didn’t pay attention to the instruction “and ensuring all Motifs are oriented the same direction”. I think the perfectionist in me is going to require that I start the join over, but at least I know what I plan to do.

As I said, I plan to follow the assembly diagram from the pattern in order to distribute my colors evenly, but in my case I have multiple shades of the color family.

Colors
A = Pinks
B = Reds
C = Yellows
D = Greens

April 28, 2025

It took 43 g of Navy to join and go all the way around 8 squares. That means I’ll need 43 g x 8 = 344 g to do the join, plus some extra to do the two unfinished sides. Since my skein of Big Twist Value Pound+ is 500 g, I should have enough to do the JAYG plus another round for a border as well, and hopefully enough to also do a round of crab stitch.

I have some regular sized skeins in Varsity Navy which is almost the same as the Pound+ Navy but I have plans for that yarn and don’t really want to break into it.

May 19, 2025

The join-as-you-go went well -- I ended up adding the final rounds for 8 squares (one row) at a time, then joining those just to break up the work. I added one more round of granny stitch in the Navy to make the outer rounds match the joins between the squares in width. I started adding crab stitch but I couldn’t get it as neat as I wanted, so I decided against it.

It should have been just 2 tails of the Navy to weave in but at one point the yarn got so tangled I had to spend 2 hours untangling it and ended up cutting it in two places to do so. I dislike these huge skeins of yarn! I’ve had the same problem with multiple brands. Of course, that didn’t keep me from buying another one at the going out of business sale when they were down to $3.35. ‍

Overall, I am quite happy with how this came out!