Friday morning, just as the clock struck ten o’clock, I put the finishing touches on Square 121 for Olek’s Love Across the USA installation in Raleigh:

All I had left to do was to pack it up with the other three squares (one crocheted by my neighbor), and drop it off at Lump — the gallery facilitating the installation in Raleigh — around noon.

Two hours later, with several errands under my belt, I arrived in downtown Raleigh to the worst parking I have seen in quite awhile, but eventually I found a space and I made my way to the gallery to drop off my squares along with the charts I had used to make the squares.

Now, I was free to get to work on my state fair piece, except for one small thing.

While I had been working on the squares for the installation, an idea had begun to percolate in my head, and with the afternoon free, and the weekend stretching before me after a couple of hours of cleaning my office, I was ready for a creative break.

Inspired by the many lattes and cappuccinos I have consumed:

I had a nascent idea for a graphic crochet heart worked into the design of a granny square. Using one of the graph paper notebooks I had unearthed in my cleaning, I sketched out a general idea of how I thought I could do it, got out my hook and yarn, and then set to work.

In short order (and on the first try), I had gotten it done to my satisfaction:

I went to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I was on the right track with this new crochet idea.

Buoyed by my success with the design and with the particulars fresh in my head, I decided to make a video tutorial:

Afterward, I continued to make progress on the dining table, but over the past year it had become a repository of crochet where the ghosts of projects past and the ghost of projects future mingle, and there was a lot be be untangled.

So this morning, after breakfast, coffee, and a walk with my dog, I resumed my efforts to reach table top.

Following Hellen Buttigieg’s dictum to put like with like, I assembled this collection of some of the projects past and projects future:

and as soon as I find a box to put them in, I will continue to the top of the table where the center panel of my state fair project awaits.