I spent most of yesterday getting ready for an ice storm that was due to arrive shortly after sunset.

The storm arrived as forecast, and I awoke to world covered in a thick coating of sleet that had continued to fall while I slept. By the time the sleet had gotten slushy enough for me to take my dog for a longer walk around the yard, here is how the street in front of my house looked:

As is evident from the single set of tire tracks, there was not a lot of traffic, so today, having laid in enough dog food, cat food, coffee, and half-and-half to see my household through until the weekend when the temperature is finally expected to stay above freezing long enough for the ice to melt before the remnants refreeze, I turned my attention to making myself a new blanket.

Having just completed a textured square blanket, I decided it was time for me to revisit a variation on this theme that I designed and used to good effect in my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project seen here on October 1, 2012, a little more than a week before it had to be finished:

The element I wanted to revisit was the multi-colortextured squares that can be seen here without any smaller squares and rectangles framing them:

Unfortunately for me, whatever notes I made at the time are buried in a notebook somewhere, the specifics of which I don’t recall, so today, while referring to the original piece, I did my best to recreate the square. After a little less than an hour, I was able to recreate the square (this time with better notes).

However, this time, instead of using a 5.5 mm hook, I used a 4.5 mm hook and ended up with an attractive, but very small square:

Not absolutely certain that I wanted to make several bazillion squares of this size, I made a second, larger multi-color square. Here it is with the original, smaller:

At the moment I have no idea which square I will choose to use for my new blanket-to-be or how any of this fits into my crochet elephant mania, but with the next several days forecast to be just above freezing during the day and just below freezing by sunset, I will have a lot of time at home in which to figure it out.