When I started the living room redecorating project, I wanted to make a nice throw to go over the back of the couch. I bought tons of yarn, and the pattern for the falling leaves afghan. I knitted four squares, sewed them together, and promptly stuffed the whole thing in the closet.

I do really like the pattern, but I think it might have been quite boring to knit several dozen more of those little six-inch squares!

Just recently I found this book - there's even a square which has a miniature aran sweater sewn on it! Amazingly enough, the finished sizes of the squares is just about exactly the size of my finished four-patch of leaves. With blocking, it ought to be just about perfect! And if not, I can always use the leaf square as a pillow!

While working on the first square, I have discovered that you really don't need a cable needle, except for the biggest, most complicated cables - all I do is drop the stitches off (on purpose!) and rearrange them in the order they need to be knitted in...keeping in mind that they need to cross in a certain direction.

The first completed square out of this book. It ended up 12 1/2" square instead of 12"...don't quite know why, since my gauge swatch was dead on. But I imagine the rest of the squares will probably be off by a little bit, too, and blocking can work miracles!

This square reminds me of my Great-Grandmother. I think maybe she had a pillow on her couch that looked something like this, although I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, it made me think of her while I made it! Because this one was done on circular needles, it's actually even a little bigger than the first block. I think I knit looser on circulars than I do on straights.

My favorite part of this block is the center panel. I really like cables that are this sort of style! This block was more complicated than I expected, because the cables that are supposed to look sort of like a DNA strand had crossed stitches on the back, as well as the front. I really hope that blocking takes care of the wavy garter stitch on the top and bottom borders!

This block was definitely not as challenging as the other blocks so far, and it shows - it sat half-finished on the needles for a few months! I do like how it came out, but I think the center panel could have been started or ended on a different row so that it was more symmetrical. Oh, well, it is just an afghan after all!

I adore this block! I think it's such a cute idea to have a miniature sweater on an afghan square, and I think it would be a very fun project to make an entire afghan with miniatures of the very favorite sweaters that I've made. Someday!

Yeah. I know. It's been a long time since I worked on this project. At the rate I'm going - I'm averaging a square every 5 months - it will be another 4 years or so until the squares are done. Anyway, since I figured it would take a few weeks to do this square, the hearts were really appropriate for Valentine's Day. Turned out it went much faster than I expected. Better cast on for the next one now!