First my apologies to any readers who tried to read my blog during a hosting outage and subsequent slowage that took many more hours than I would have liked to resolve.

Additionally, it turned out that when it comes to computer housekeeping, I am not the best, and a wordpress update coupled with the fact that I had not cleaned out my browser cache added to my difficulties.

Now, onto my blog post.

When I went to my last crochet guild meeting, one of the guild members mentioned that it was a bad idea to get an x-ray of your back if you were over 50 because they were bound to find something.

I shared this with my mother, because she also has “back issues” that, like my fellow crochet guild member, were first diagnosed through the magic of an x-ray.

As a result of my mother’s x-ray, she has had a series of appointments for additional diagnostic tests and physicians to determine a course of treatment.

The first stop for my mom, as it turns out, is physical therapy, and that is where I, dog sitter to Toby, come in.

Toby (as my regular readers know) is my mom’s devoted Shi Tzu. He is not the most personable of dogs, and to say he is not fond of me personally is an understatement, but he does like crochet, and in acknowledgment of his appreciation of my craft, I made this pet mat for him:

So even though Toby does not particularly like anyone who is not my mom, I am happy to dog sit for him as he has a greater appreciation of my craft than a lot of people do.

While I was at my mom’s I once again turned my attention to the textured squares afghan that has gotten hold of me; Toby sat quietly while I finished work on the fourth medium square which can be seen with the other three here:

Next, I joined the squares into two strips of two:

Then, I joined the two strips composed of two squares each into this square:

Now that the design created by the texture is beginning to emerge, I have decided that I will make five more borderless large squares like this one, join those six squares in a 3×2 array, and then add a border to the entire piece (unless I decide to do something else, like border it with the small squares).

What I am learning from this project is that even if I only have one color to work with, I can always find a way to make it more complicated.

Video Tutorial: How to make the crochet textured square/magic motif