I had a lot of fun pulling out skeins and comparing effects. I may have gone a little crazy toward the end, but that’s ok. I have faith that it’ll all work out in the end. ;o)

I foresee much fun in this project-- but it’ll probably drag out for a while.

April 23rd--
I’ve slightly altered how I work round 3. Instead of chaining 3 right from the start, I first slip stitch into the adjacent space. I think this leaves less of a gap between the ch3 and the following double crochets.

I’m using a wide variety of yarns and brands, and as always when I do this (most especially if I put Caron Simply Soft into the mix), there’s a noticeable discrepancy between the thickness of one yarn and the next-- and therefore between one motif and the next. I’m trying to balance that out by using the thinner yarn only in conjunction with the others… and I’ll just hope that it will even out enough that it’s not a problem.

January 4th--
I’ve started “joining as I go” on the last round of a basketful of the motifs. I’m using different shades of cream and ecru for those final rounds, in an attempt at “artfully random” (which of course means that it’s not actually random at all…).

I’m loving the joining phase-- but I think I underestimated how many motifs I’ll need, so I’ll probably take a break from joining to make more of the flowers. (Aiming for as equal a distribution of color combos as possible…)

January 31st--
Phew!
Finished, finally.

I used a half-hexagon pattern (similar to this one, but maybe tweaked a bit) to fill in the ten large gaps along two of the edges.

For the border, I went around the whole thing in single crochet three times in three different shades of cream/ecru/beige. Then I went around one last time in another beige yarn, this time strategically placing a few 5-dc popcorn stitches in amongst the single crochet. On the zig-zaggy sides, I put a popcorn stitch at the “peaks” and “valleys”-- high points and low points. For the shorter, straight sides, I just tried my best to place them evenly-- every nine or ten stitches or so. (They’re not perfectly spaced, but I really doubt it’ll be obvious.)