Aidan's 1st Blankie!

So here I am on Facebook reading updates from Inner Hooker about her first Crochet-a-long. I have yet to participate in a CAL but have wanted to for the longest time. Just the other day, I was at Wal-mart talking to Fred about whether I should buy this new yarn called Baby Blanket by Bernat so that I could finally make my 8-month old a blankie. Well I bought enough to make a knitted cabled blanket but this CAL is really itching me. I grabbed my pen and notebook and started writing down some of the details on the project. I thought, hmm ok some of these people are using really nice colors, if I were to do this project what colors would I choose? At that moment, I look over at my son rolling around on his ABC mat. Perfect! I could definitely use the same colors as his mat. I’m pretty sure I have all yarn in my stash and if I don’t, I could just use this as an excuse to buy more. I could knock out two birds with one stone. My son gets his blankie and I get to do my very first CAL! The project is set up to be arranged 8 squares by 11 squares for a total of 88 squares. Each square has 8-9 rows depending on the size you choose to make. Well Aidan’s ABC mat only has 6 colors so I read through the pattern and saw that it could be easily modified to be 6 rounds. Anyway, the project is set up for an adult size afghan. Another hooker mentioned that one of her challenges has been the possible color combinations, describing it as a big logic puzzle. Ok think, think, think! Didn’t you learn something in high school math class that could solve this problem? Ugh! I can’t remember, so I google “how to find all possible combinations.” And there it is, permutations. I don’t have a clue about permutations anymore but I know this is what I need. So then, I google “permutation generator.” Voila! I find: Text Combination/Permutation Generators . Using the Universal Text Permutation Generator, I enter each color: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple. I then click generate and there are 720 possible combinations. Wow! I seriously need to narrow this down. I only need about 1/8 of those combinations for the blanket so I guess I’ll have to just narrow it down manually.
Ok so here’s the plan. I will cut and paste the possible combinations into Excel and delete all the combinations that are too similar. I think I have my work cut out for me!
By the way, I am already behind! The CAL is about to start on week 3!
Wish me luck!

<3 Aleana