Now that I have finished both a practically perfect granny square bag and a flamingo-inspired practically perfect granny square bag (both of which had lain dormant in a bag in my office for many months) the UFOs (UnFinished Objects) in my office from which I have to choose are decidedly slimmer pickings.

Often a WIP (Work In Progress) transitions to the UFO state for one of two reasons:

1) a more urgent project comes up
2) there is a technical challenge to be solved

I had stopped work on the two practically perfect bags for the first reason.

State Fair season had arrived, and I was going to spend all my crochet time on this project:

which I did, but because of the myriad pieces and complicatedness of the design, I didn’t manage to finish in time for the 2015 State Fair deadline. So I put this project (for which had put others on hold) into a plastic bin in my office where it has sat for several months now.

But atop the plastic bin that houses my state fair behemoth, sat another more modest project that I had begun and which had been set aside for the second reason: a technical challenge.

An overview of the project thus far includes these markings on the interior of a brown paper bag that I had cut open so that I had room to make drawings and copious notes that I could see all in one place:

The idea was that I would make an ovalish shape that would pretty much fit within the parameters noted in ink.

When I set the project aside, I had just finished frogging it back to the fourth round. The notes I had made about where and how to put increases had not been updated for several froggings and re-crochets, and in the months that it had been sitting atop the plastic bin, dog hair had collected in the yarn that had been frogged and that yarn then tangled.

But this afternoon, after a couple of hours untangling yarn and picking out dog hair, I had my ovalish shape:

as well as comprehensive and coherent notes to which I can later refer when writing up the pattern:

I am very excited to see if I can pull off this project. It is, at it’s core, both affirming and fun, and I hope that people find it to be just what they need for summer.