I have spent most of the past couple of days working on these two-round granny squares:

But when I was not crocheting granny squares, I was stewing about what motif I would work on next now that I am confident that the clock is on the right track.

In search of inspiration for what should come next, I turned to the pages of the Edwardsville Intelligencer that are available to me from an online database and tried to learn what I could about my grandmother’s life.

Reading about my grandmother as told in snippets from various items that had been published in the newspaper, I learned (among other things) that she and my grandfather had been avid pinochle players.

With that in mind, I looked to this tablecloth she had embroidered for inspiration:

This card table tablecloth is one of the artifacts of my grandmother’s life that gives me a small bit of insight into what her life might have been like, and allows me to run my fingers over her work and perhaps by doing so, see the world from her vantage.

Looking at the tablecloth, the first thing I noticed was that the palette of my grandmother’s handiwork, like so much of her life, was more limited than mine.

There are no outrageous pinks our unruly oranges, no deep purples or vivid greens, just a muted red, a baby blue, a pink that wants to be vibrant, and a gray that possesses a hint of sage green — all of this on a woven fabric that was probably a very stark white when it was new.

Using soft white Red Heart Super Saver, I started crocheting a round motif that would allow me to recreate the decorative elements of each corner of the tablecloth. Not entirely certain I liked the way it was coming out, I crocheted another round motif, this time working it in a spiral:

Still not certain which I liked better (each had strengths and weaknesses) by mid-afternoon I had finally settled on one, and came up with a motif that (when decorated) I think will work:

Despite having gotten this far, I still have a lot of work to do. There are three more motifs to be made, and then all of them need to be decorated, and then problem of how to square them off will need to be solved, but for the moment, I am luxuriating in having gotten something done, even though I don’t know how these pieces will fit together or what story they will tell.