Today would have been the perfect day to set housework aside and concentrate fully on crochet.

Yesterday and the day before were given over to rain that washed away much of the pollen, while today’s skies vacillated between somewhat overcast and occasionally sunny. Exactly the right weather to sit outside and work on a project — any project.

Instead, I spent much of the day preparing for houseguests, and because I was thinking of my crochet instead of the tasks at hand, my progress was slow.

I wanted to be crocheting, and as I vacuumed, swept, and sorted laundry, my mind was never on what I was doing, rather it was focused on what I wanted to be doing. Finally, sometime in the late mid-afternoon, I surrendered to the clarion call of my craft and picked up where I left off with square 57.

Square 57 was the square for week 20 of the Jean Leinhauser 101 Crochet Squares crochet-long, and just 44 weeks later, I got mine done:

But the course of true crochet, like love, did not run smooth. When I got to work on the third round, I noticed that my motif had a peculiar, almost oval shape to it. I say peculiar because it was supposed to be round, and I say almost oval, because it appeared to be oval from so many directions, it almost had to be a circle.

When I looked over the directions and compared them to the project at hand I discovered my mistakes.

Mistake number 1 was starting with 12 double crochets (dc) instead of 16. Mistake number 2 was increasing an entirely different way which resulted in 36 trebles (trc) instead of 32. So while I did manage to create a new pattern for a circle, I did not manage to create the foundation that would allow me to finish square 57, so I had to start over.

With square 57 successfully completed, I then turned my attention to the cat runner-to-be.

Because I have an active imagination, I actually believed for some part of the afternoon that I was going to get this done in time for the arrival of our house guests, and that I would be able to lay it across the sofa so that cat could shed on her runner instead of on the upholstery of the sofa. I had found a square I needed that had been misplaced among one of the yarn tangles that is nearly (but not quite) fully unraveled, and I thought that this discovery was a talisman that would propel me to a finished object.

By the end of the afternoon I had discovered that the power of the formerly missing square was not enough to allow me to finish the project, but it was enough to allow me to make the progress seen here:

My capacity to believe that I can finish a project in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary helps me get my blog written each day and my state fair projects done each year, and so rather than bemoaning the fact that I never seem to be able to get done all that I hope to get done, I suppose that I should celebrate the fact that I have the capacity to create my dreams one stitch at a time.