Last Thursday, I had to get my blog post done early. I had a ticket to see the inimitable Judy Chicago interviewed at the University of New Mexico. It required some juggling of my schedule, but it was worth it.

As my regular readers know, I recently received a box of crochet and yarny goodness to put to use on my journey of a thousand crochet squares, and as I sat weaving in the ends of the twenty-seven crochet remnants I was gifted, I thought out all the time it would take to set up all of the pieces for their round-by-round photoshoots, and then I recalled something Judy Chicago talked about in her interview.

At one point, she had been invited to participate in a group show. She was the sole woman in a sea of men, and when she brought that to the attention of the show’s curator , she was told she was the only woman they had found who had documented her work, and that documenting one’s work was critical to being included in the show.

There is a lot in my life I  don’t document in a day. I don’t take before and after pictures of the the laundry I fold or the dishes I wash,  but the truth is, documentation is a powerful tool, and when I thought about it as a tool that I use instead of another thing I have to do, it changed my perspective completely.

So this time, instead of thinking of all the different ways I could be spending the time I would have to use to set the squares up for their photo, I saw it as an important and necessary component of the work I do:

With the twenty-seven remnants properly documented, I then had to take another every-so-slight detour. I had noticed while weaving in the ends that the granny square pattern used to make most of the remnants was different than anything I had seen before.

Several years ago I did a crochet-off of sorts using four different granny square patterns. I called it “Granny squares by the books,” and before I even took hook to yarn, I thought I knew which square I was going to like best.

I was wrong, and because I had tried a granny square pattern that was new-to-me, it led me on a completely new series of work that I otherwise would not have done.

So it was with that in mind that I decided that I had better document what I call “A filet crochet granny square tutorial”

With the detour of both writing and testing the pattern done, I moved on and finished rehabbing one of the remnants I had been gifted:

And all of this reminds me that even when we think we know where the path we are on is going to take us, we still encounter things along the way that we didn’t expect, one stitch at a time.