This is a story about beginnings. Although the start of anything often has an element of the arbitrary to it, these beginnings — even if the reasons seem capricious — help us to see ourselves in a new light and work toward goals we find important, and the older I get, the more important these opportunities to reimagine myself (and my work) become.

Twenty eighteen was a watershed year for me in many ways, not the least of which were the many endings which, as so many endings do, led to many beginnings..

I moved out of a house I had lived in for over a decade and found myself faced with having to actually downsize my yarn holdings instead of writing endless blog posts about how I needed to downsize my yarn holdings, I met and came to know several DNA cousins whose potential existence had been something filed in the “hazy possibilities of life” part of my brain, and three years and ten weeks after I began work on what started as my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project, I finally finished a crochet blanket to commemorate the life of my paternal grandmother, Nora Buchta Stahlhut — a woman I never met.

And amid all of that, I continued to work on rehabbing my many and varied crochet remnants for Project Amigo, taking the disparates bits and pieces of my crochet empire and turning them into five and six-inch squares, and it is that particular endeavor that I continued to focus on today.

Yesterday, I had gotten a few more rounds done on at least some of the fifteen (less one) crochet remnants I had been working on previously:

Those efforts led me to accumulate more yarn scraps which I added to this bag of yarn scraps from an earlier attempt to organize my yarn holdings:

Then, while I waited for a cellphone repair, I tied those many strands of yarn together, and this new “magic ball” of scrap yarn was the result:

With the cellphone repair successfully completed, I headed back home and worked as quickly as I could to finish as many rehabbed crochet squares as possible, and while the days are finally getting longer, today wasn’t quite long enough for me to finish all fifteen rehabbed squares, but I came close:

When the sun rises on tomorrow I will finish the fourteenth square, then clean up a bit with the hope that I find the missing crochet remnant, but even if I don’t, I expect I will be able to find a worthy substitute, an I will continue moving forward, one stitch at a time.