My day started out with what is termed a three-hour delay.

Despite the warmer temperatures over the weekend after Friday’s freezing rain, not all of the ice on the road had had a chance to melt, and there was just enough ice on the many narrow and winding roads in the county where I live to make it unsafe for the buses to traverse them in the pre-dawn hours, hence the three-hour delay.

So while my crochet day did not begin as early as usual, once I got to it, the first order of business was to finish the parts needed to assemble Sherbet the bear.

Based on Narumi Ogawa’s pattern in her book Mr. Funky’s Crochet Super Wonderful, this is a project that has taken me a long time, and in the intervening years since I began the project ,pieces have been misplaced, my gauge changed, and most likely, I am using a different hook that has changed the resulting fabric some.

All of the changes over all of that time have meant that I had to redo things here and there, but today I finally finished all of the pieces I needed:

All that was left to do to bring Sherbet to life was to stuff him.

Stuffing any sort of project is a skill — a skill at which I am not sufficiently well-practiced, so my progress is often slow.

While I go through periods of time where I stuff a number of projects and thereby achieve a measure of efficiency and grace, if today marks one of those periods, it is the awkward and uncomfortable beginning, not the comfortable ease that might one day replace it.

However, after an hour or so spent stuffing and unstuffing, then refluffing and restuffing, I finally got Sherbet put together and took this photo of him with his natty scarf:

and a second photo of him with other complete amigurumi compatriots:

As the the phrase “completed amigurumi compatriots” suggests, there are some as-yet-to-be completed amigurumi that need work as well, but they will have to wait for another day.