Recently I realised how much work this afghan is going to be. I don’t have a specific date in mind for finishing — it would be great to have it done for Anselm’s birthday, but if not, there’s always Christmas (or… Twelfth night, or Valentine’s, or St Patrick’s…) — but I don’t want to have it hanging around half-finished for longer than I need to, either. So in the last week or two I have made a couple of big pushes and have now finished the second panel:

I’m still using Lion Brand Mandala yarn; this second colourway is called “Genie”. I quite like the way the greys and greens fade into each other, and I love love love the grey next to the orange from the first panel:

Next comes the most challenging part of the project so far. Heretofore it’s just been about a million moss stitches in long rows. For the third panel, I’m keeping the same stitch, but I’m turning the whole project and working perpendicularly to what I’ve already done. The two panels right now make a sort of “L” shape; the third panel is going to fill out the empty space of the L, and then wrap around the first panel. If you look at the first picture above, I’ll be working from the middle towards the left-hand side, and when that empty space is filled I’ll be elongating my row to cover all the way up to the edge of the first panel (along the top of the couch there). Because I’m going to be working at 90 degrees to my first two panels, I’ll have to hook my row ends into the first panel. I think it will work well — I can picture it quite clearly in my head — but of course, the real test is in the doing! Stay tuned to see how (and if!) it works.