With the cookieghan completed and nearly ready to be sent off, I basked in the exceedingly short-lived afterglow of a finished project for all of 10 hours, and then life did what life does: it moved on.

Part of life moving on meant that I would be taking my mom to her her second post-operative follow up after what has turned out to be very successful cataract surgery done last Monday.

Since I learned to crochet, I try to never leave the house without something to work on, and this is particularly true when I know I am going to be in a waiting room.

If I don’t have my crochet, the waiting is long and tedious. If I do have my crochet, I get to work free of the distractions of home, and the time passes both quickly and pleasantly.

With the cookieghan completed, what would I work on?

Then it came to me.

Last night, I had been chatting on IM (Instant Message) with a friend. Could I, she asked, crochet Square 89 from Jean Leinhauser’s 101 Crochet Squares?. Not one to turn down an invitation to crochet, I said yes.

So this morning, when I was wanting to get out of the house in a timely manner, grabbed my copy of 101 Crochet Squares and my crochet hooks, threw them in my purse which had half a skein of Red Heart Super Saver café already in it, and set out to get my mother to her appointment on time.

As it happened, the doctor was running an hour to an hour-and-a-half behind, so I had plenty of time time to work on the square in question which was, at it happens, 14 rounds of single crochet:

One change I made to the pattern was to simply make a chain-1 for the first single crochet stitch of the round rather than making a chain-1 and then working a single crochet into the same stitch. I think it makes for a much smoother seam where the join takes place:

One of the reasons this square had so strongly piqued my interest was the decoration of the surface. I had wrongly assumed that it was all slip stitch across the top.

It is not; rather it is chains of varying lengths (3, 4, and 5) anchored to the surface of the square using a slip stitch around the indicated post of a single crochet stitch of the square:

I love the result and will be able to use this technique to good effect to add decorative elements to future projects.

When I set out on one of these crochet square adventures I never know where it will lead, but I always know I will be glad that I went.