Since hearing the Merry Scully’s interview of Judy Chicago, I have a new respect for the part of my work that I think if as “documenting crochet.” It isn’t flashy. It doesn’t involve fun colors or cool stitches, but it is, at it turns out, necessary.

I am reminded to some degree of a Joan Didion essay titled, “Why I Write.”

When I taught writing I often assigned the essay because it was the perfect jumping off point for talking about what possible purpose writing could have outside of torturing students with seemingly arcane and inscrutable rules that weren’t even rules, and if they were rules, who got to decide that anyway?

Writing is an enormously useful tool in the evolution of human thinking.

First, in the “how to” vein, it allows us to record what we did so that in the future we are not forced to constantly re-invent the wheel — we can instead look at our notes and use them as a starting point.

Second, it also serves as a record of what we thought, and then, when we re-read it, we then get to think about what we thought about. This ability to think about what we have previously “thought about” is another important tool in our “how to be a human” toolkit, and when used properly, it can help us to be our better selves.

So in the interest of saving some future someone some of the trouble I go to with my crochet (often that future someone is me), I am changing my attitude toward documenting what I have done, and I hope to do it with a greater measure of joy and equanimity.

Since my last blog post, I worked on a  variety of things, the first of which was the first round of rehab for the twenty-seven granny square remnants I received. I could have joined them to each other in groups of four and then finished them off with a round of single crochet, but I preferred extending the granny-ness of them and started with the DK weight yarn provided:

When it was time to document for both my blog post and “future Leslie,” the neutral yarns were still completely intact:

But I had made a sizable dent in the partial and complete mini skeins of yarn which  originally numbered twenty-one:

In the interest of not losing them, I also dug up the nine crochet remnants I had been working on before the box of crochet magic arrived, and I got all of the ends woven in and trimmed:

Then I placed the ready to rehab remnants in a plastic bag with a zipping seal so that I would not have to fish them out of the bottom of my purse again.

I’m not a hundred percent certain that my future self will agree that documenting all of this was a good idea. I’ll just have to keep moving forward one stitch at a time so that I have the chance to meet her one day.