I had all kinds of plans — things to do, places to go, projects to crochet.

I got almost none of it done. It was, to say the least, a very s-l-o-w crochet day.

Today, I felt as if I were an exotic scarab trapped in amber looking out onto an unmovable world tinged with gold.

My efforts to move in any direction (forward, backward, up, or down) seemed to be thwarted by the universe, and my progress at the end of the day was not really quantifiable because so little got done.

What makes this somewhat worrisome is that I have two largeish projects I need/want to have done by mid-May.

The need-to-have-done-by-mid-May-project is a beach blanket/afghan that is to be a wedding gift. After giving it careful thought, I have decided to make a reprise of the Granny Sampler Afghan from the classic tome: Better Homes and Garden Crocheting and Knitting.

This is my first effort:

While I love the finished project, the fit of the pieces is not perfect; this is in part because the pieces don’t fit together perfectly, and in part because I followed the directions in the book which stated the following:

Afghan assembly — Following diagram on pages 88-89, whipstitch center motifs together.

These directions would make sense if that were how the pieces of the afghan had been joined, but a cursory look at the photo in the book shows that much of the afghan was assembled using a join-as-you-go technique which is a much more forgiving than the whipstitch and allows for a smoother joining of pieces that don’t fit together perfectly.

Since my first effort required that I reverse engineer many of the squares from the photos in the book (a number of the directions in the book do not produce the square pictured), I decided that making this afghan a second time would allow me to use the patterns generated by the first effort to figure out (in this second effort) in what order the join-as-you-go joinings were done.

This wonky off-kilterness that practically demands that one use join-as-you-go is outside my comfort zone (I like things to fit as perfectly as possible), but I figure I am up to the challenge, and I just might learn something I can use in a future project.

My want-to-have-done-by-mid-May project presents a different challenge.

The deadline for this project is more fungible, but the idea for this project (a baker’s dozen of each of a baker’s dozen of cookies) came to me over a year ago, and since then I have spent hours cruising up and down the cookie aisles of every grocery store I have been. I would like to get this “cookieghan” done so that it will let me rest.

Of necessity a cookieghan requires a large array of off-white, beige, and brown to, but I have also managed to work in some color for my own palette relief:

I hope that I muster more energy for tomorrow and that today’s stasis of s-l-o-w crochet turns out to be an insignificant blip as I work toward completing these projects.

Related posts: OMG! I finished the-afghan-that-has-eluded me
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