After a long, exhausting, and illuminating weekend, it felt good to get back to a regular schedule, so after I got my son off to school, ate breakfast, and walked the dog, I was ready to focus on my crochet.

As of this morning, I had 18 working days left to my new year’s intention to spend the first two months of the year finishing unfinished projects; one of the projects I am looking forward to putting in the done pile is an Anne Halliday design that I call “If pigs (and dogs and birds and bears and frogs and lions and turtles) could fly.”

When working on a large project, a certain efficiency can be achieved if all of the pieces are made before they are joined (assuming it is not a “join as you go” project). The repetition of making the same thing six times in a row means that as you work from the first to the sixth, you learn certain efficiencies along that way that you do not achieve if you make one here and one there.

However, this efficiency comes at a cost: how and where to keep the myriad pieces that collect when you make them. So to minimize the opportunity to lose any of the pieces for this project, I started piecing them together Friday and got this far:

I did, however, hit a piecing-together wall when I got to the end of the first row; I needed a turtle and did not have one. Over the weekend, I remedied the situation, and finished one turtle in its entirety. This left me with five headless turtles, so I started my crochet day by making five turtle heads:

With the heads done, I returned to the piecing. I not only finished the first two rows:

I got a good start on the third as well:

Happy to have made progress on the long languishing project, I rewarded myself with this lovely compendium of granny square projects from Crochet World that I found at Kroger when I was picking up a few items for dinner:

It’s hard not to love a store where you can find what you need to feed your imagination as well as your family.