One of my gifts to myself this year is to have a fully functional office by January 1, 2016.

It is something I have been promising myself for most of the year, but with Christmas 2015 now in the rearview mirror of life, and the start of 2016 looming large on the horizon, I decided that I had put if off long enough.

I started by emptying a bag of stuff that had previously been in my car and which had been sitting in my office for more than a month waiting to be dealt with.

After more than an hour spent tossing things out, putting things away, and untangling and then rolling bits of yarn of varying amounts, here is how the bag looked:

Delighted that the bag had been emptied and then converted from a general “catch all” to a specific purpose “destash” receptacle, I went about working on the thing that had been at the top of the bag: an unfinished project.

I had started the project in November of 2014 when the dog of a dear friend of mine suddenly died. It was abrupt and sudden and it was, as these losses tend to be, quite painful, and I felt that a comfort shawl was in order.

Despite having immediately gotten to work on the project, as it neared completion, I got a little bit stuck, and so it has sat for an age. This past weekend, however, I finally got to work on the finishing details.

Here is how the shawl appeared in November of 2014 when I stopped work on it:

It was sooooo close to done, but it needed a little something more than just the clouds being appliquéd and the ends woven in and trimmed, so this weekend I got started on the “a little something more.”

First, using my equally rusty cursive writing and tambour crochet skills, I wrote (in slip stitches) the beloved dog’s name on one side of the rainbow:

and then I got a start on a crochet representation of the dog for the other side of the rainbow.

Using black and brown, I alternated stitches and got the face done, but after looking it over, I have yet to decide if I like this side better:

or this one:

Lucky for me, my efforts at crocheting a muzzle did not go nearly as well, so while I try to get that figured out, I’ve got plenty of time to decide.

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