Today looked like a Wolfgang Laib piece come to life; the German born conceptual artist has used pollen to create some major works (one of which can be seen here):

I think that today he would probably have felt right at home sitting at the table which serves as my outdoor office as every surface within a 50 mile radius is covered with at least a thin veneer of pollen.

On Tuesday, I noticed that a fine, slightly gritty film of yellow had begun to settle on my car and the walkways. Then yesterday, in the early evening just as the sun was beginning to set, a yellow haze filled the sky. Large plumes of pollen could be seen as the the particles were propelled into the atmosphere by a wind that had picked up just after the dinner hour.

The swirls and whirls of vortexes of pollen were visible as the pollen made its descent from the trees, and today, my front porch, and every other horizontal surface for as far as the eye could see, was covered with pollen:

In the aftermath of yesterday’s pollen letting, I turned my attention to the Little Boy Blue blanket, and shortly before it was time to leave for my son’s trumpet lesson, I had finished the body of the blanket. All of the seams were joined, all of the the ends were woven in and trimmed:

all that remained was to figure out what to do for a border.

I decided that a blanket for a little boy should have some moving parts, so I settled on adding small squares around the edge that could be manipulated by small hands.

Using the directions for the first round of the Nana Square that is the motif I used for the project, I used a join-as-you-go technique to attach the small squares, and while I am no where near done with the border, I am pleased with how it looks so far:

As described by Sol LeWitt, conceptual art ” means all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Conceptual crochet, like conceptual art, is ultimately an expression of our understanding and vision of the juxtapositions and connections that are possible when we create a world one stitch at a time.