The purpose for yesterday’s field trip to Flanders Art Gallery was twofold.

One was to see Olek’s work up close and personal.

The other was to gather any crochet mojo she might have left in her wake and use said mojo to finish (or at least attempt to finish) the cookies need ed for the cookieghan.

When I got up this morning, I had ten cookies still to make.

I focused my first efforts on finishing the chocolate chip cookies, and by 3:00, I had them done. Would I, I wondered, be able to finish the colorful candy cookies before sunset and while getting dinner ready?

I wasn’t sure.

As I originally worked the cookie, I had 22 ends per cookie to weave in. While not insurmountable in and of itself, crocheting four cookies and weaving in the 88 accompanying ends while cooking dinner is a bit more challenging.

I decided to borrow a finishing technique from Olek: the square knot.

Despite having tied any number of ends together with my magic balls of scrap yarn, I decided the first thing I needed to do was review how to tie a square knot, and I found this excellent graphic/totorial which you can see here.

Confident that I could tie square knots in my sleep, I then moved onto the first cookie in question. Here is how it looked before I tied the ends of the outer round:

Here is how it looked after the ends were secured with square knots:

and here it is with the ends all trimmed:

From this point, I crocheted the back, wove in the final end and went onto the next cookie. Then, with just a little over an hour to go until sunset, I finished the last cookie I would need to make the cookieghan, and here it is with the other 168 cookies:

So,the trip to Flanders Gallery proved to be both interesting and productive, and tomorrow, I will attempt to tap into the universal crochet mojo, and get a good start on assembling the cookies into a throw.

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