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One of the side projects I've been working on for the past month or so is a bunch of patches for an afghan. Afghan patches are a great little side project - you can have lots of fun playing around with stitch patterns and get a nice break from your main project without having a million WIP's (ask me how I know this).
Oddly shaped patches aren't an issue if it's a crazy quilt style afghan but for a group project they can pose a problem since it's much easier to deal with uniform squares and we always should be nice to the person actually willing to seam-up 200+ squares. Yes, you can always pick-up some stitches and add a few rows of garter stitch border to even out your squares, but that can be a bit on the tedious side with matching gauge and I can't be the only one who thinks garter stitch in the round is a total PITA.
This where a couple of rounds of crochet can help - you get almost instant gratification, it's much easier to frog back a row of single-crochets because the gauge is off rather than realizing it after a few rounds of garter, and crochet in the round has a uniform look to it so you don't have to deal with the jogs in garter stitch.
I was playing around with a mitred square and slipped stitches in this patch, but the slipped stitches affected my gauge and the square didn't turn out to be the 10" I needed it to be so I decided to add a mitered garter strip to make up the difference on realizing after it was done that my gauge was still way off and no amount of blocking would make it lay flat.
I put it aside to knock out a few granny squares and then had the idea to try a crocheted edging.
I had a few false starts where I had to play around with the spacing of some decreases to get my crochet gauge to match the square but I am very happy with the results.
