With the state fair season nearly upon me, I am having to make decisions about what to set aside and what to finish before August 1.

When I began work on the scrap yarn crochet ripple blanket, I had thought I could get it done before it was time to start work on the state fair piece, but when the sun set on Thursday, it was clear to me that notion was fanciful, to say the least.

So I began to look for something that needed doing and which I could get done, and that one thing was to make myself a new crochet bag.

When I was making this crochet soccer ball (pattern is available for purchase here):

I realized the peace sign motif would make an interesting hexagon for a purse, but there was one problem; the peace sign as I had designed it was perfect for the soccer ball, but not perfect for most hexagon purse designs.

In order to use the motif for a purse I would need the ends of the four interior lines to line up with the corresponding vertices to line up with the ends interior lines of the peace sign, instead of being perpendicular to the sides.

I tried several things to remedy the problem, but each one failed, some more spectacularly than others. Then when I was doing something altogether unrelated, I got an idea about something I could do that might work, and it did.

So on Friday, I got out 18 of my favorite colors and a partial skein of a discontinued Red Heart Super Saver variegated yarn called piñata, and I got to work.

By the time I got up this morning, I had made substantive progress:

Pleased with what I had accomplished I took my dog out for his morning walk, so that I could clear my schedule. While we made our way down the street, I planned every moment of the morning and afternoon in my head, and it was going just swimmingly until my dog started pulling at his leash and barking.

My reverie interrupted, I looked to see what he was barking about, expecting that it was one of the neighborhood bunnies, or a fox who occasionally strolls through the neighborhood.

It was neither.

It was a Schnauzer who lives around the corner from me:

I took my dog home, got a couple of slices of salami to use as Schnauzer bait, and headed out to look for the wayward dog.

I began retracting my steps from the earlier walk to no avail, but I circled back toward a busier road, where I eventually did find her. Her people, as it happens were not home, so I took her back to my house, wrote notes on a couple of index cards with my name and contact information, and taped them to their doors.

Then, with my dog and my unexpected guest situated so that they could each see me without seeing each other, I got to work:

Both dogs seemed content to watch me crochet, so I worked as quickly as I could, but because I was working with 18 colors, the work was slow. Some combinations that had looked perfect in my mind’s eye were not as compelling in life, so I frogged a little here and a little there.

Here is how far I had gotten when it was time to call it a day:

I have a lot that I need to get done in the next 24 hours, and I will do it the only way possible: one stitch at a time.