Square After Square

The Ravelry CAL Afghans: I finished three more of the Dreamcatcher squares (the CAL selection for January) for these sampler afghans I have planned and then finally got my first Cross My Heart square done, which is the selection for February. See the pictures on the right.

I'm getting a kick out of the color names for these multicolor yarns. The shaded pinks one on the top is called 'Candy Print'. The next one down, which is mainly pink, beige and dark brown is called 'Cherry Chip'. The pink, beige, green and light brown one is called 'Pink Camo'. In contrast, the multicolor I'm using for the browns colorway afghan is simply called 'Shaded Browns', kind of a boring name compared to the others, don't you think?

I'm really enjoying how these are turning out. Especially now that I have the first two squares done in the browns colorway, I'm able to better see how the colors are working together and get a little peek at how the afghan might turn out. I'm hoping I'll get the same preview when I finish the Cross My Heart square for each of the other colorways as well.

Now that I have these five afghans started, it is a challenge keeping up with all the yarn and the finished squares. So far, each afghan has four colors assigned to it, and I'm keeping each of these in a different bag. There is some overlap of colors, though, with the browns because two of the pink colorways use a brown from the brown colorway, but I'm going to go ahead and have separate skeins for each colorway in order to keep each bag a project to itself and lessen my confusion.

I've been keeping all my afghan squares--all of these plus the Ravelry Book Club Afghan squares and the still solitary Great North American Afghan square all in one bag because it's still a small stack of squares, but as the pile grows, I'll need to split them up. Since these afghans will probably take a year or more to make, I'll need to come up with some kind of acceptable storage system until all the squares are completed and it's time to sew them together.

There is also a Tunisian Crochet CAL on Ravelry, and they are also doing a block a month. I'm thinking about doing those blocks to alternate with these regular crochet blocks in order to have enough blocks for each afghan sooner, but in order to do that, I need to get the specialized hook for that and hope I get the right size to create squares the same size as these. It's always an adventure!

I'm also toying with the idea of doing an illusion crochet square to put in the middle of each afghan, bringing the total squares for each afghan to 25 and thus 5 squares x 5 squares, which will make each afghan a 60 x 60-inch square.

I just recently discovered illusion crochet on Ravelry when someone did their design square for one of the Ravelry Book Club's selections in that method. It looks like stripes when you look at it straight on, but when you look at it from an angle, a hidden image appears. It is really cool! The same thing can also be accomplished in knitting, so I'm looking forward to trying both.

Here's a link to some pictures of illusion crochet (you have to scroll down): http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=101914;sa=showTopics