I was enjoying crochet.....

I was enjoying learning to crochet......until Crochet Know-How 4.  This chapter deals with increasing and decreasing, obviously a useful technique if I wish to become competent at crochet.  It looked pretty easy in the book, but turned out to be a nightmare!  The project is a cushion crocheted from squares in two colors - you start with 3 stitches, then increase at the end of each row until you reach the desired width, change colors, then decrease at the end of each row until you are back to 3 stitches, and supposedly you have a neat square of crochet.  In my case, not so neat and not so square.  

This is the cushion from Golden Hands

I had trouble getting the increasing side and the decreasing side to match in size, and my finished shape was more of a weird elongated diamond, rather than something recognizable as a square.

In the project, the cushion is made out of 9 squares joined together.  I think I made about 25 squares before I got some that looked even remotely squarish and even then I had to block them out to shape.

After many hours of frustration, I ended up with squares of two different sizes, so I decided to make two cushions with each group of squares - 4 squares for each cushion.  I used 6 balls of Cleckheaton 8ply wool in three shades - cream, light brown and dark brown.

Golden Hands suggests that you either crochet more squares for the back (I couldn't face that!) or sew on a piece of material for the backing.  I didn't think that would work so well, as the crochet is stretchy and may pull away from a woven cloth.  In the end I just decided to crochet a piece to fit the back and crochet it together.  I had a couple of cushion pads in my cupboard that fitted my cushions, so the ordeal is finally over!