The orange afghan project I recently pulled out of the cubby of an IKEA storage unit that holds many (but not all) of my UFOs (UnFinished Objects) has been many years in the making.

Based on the color used and the design of the square, my best guess is that I began work on it sometime after September of 2004, and before August of 2005.

As can be seen from this swatch I pulled out the bag where I had collected all of the pieces from this long abandoned project:

I experimented with different design options before settling on the squares that I eventually used.

Now, however, I am settled on the overall design, and to that end, I began making additional squares to be used in completing the throw.

First, I made these five new squares from the large single crochet swatch:

and I then took this second swatch (also single crochet):

and made three more squares:

Satisfied with my progress on the crochet, I then did what I could to bring order to the yarn that remained.

Inspired by this video a fellow crochet shared with me:

I reached into the recesses of another cubby in the same IKEA unit and found the nostepinne I had purchased at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair two years earlier. Like the many UFOs housed in the same unit, it had lain dormant for far too long, but armed with the recently acquired knowledge I had gained watching the demonstration provided in the above video, a never-used nostepinne, and a messy skein of yarn:

I got to work and transformed not one, but two very messy skeins of yarn into two not nearly as messy center-pull balls of yarn:

and then, so I could see how far I had come and what was left to do, I spread out all of the pieces I have made thus far:

I then weighed a row’s worth of squares to see how many ounces of yarn would be needed to make another row, and found that the yarn that was left is about an ounce shy of what is required.

Now all that’s left to do is assemble the pieces.