A pandemic is exactly the sort of event that gives you a chance to examine your life and reset your priorities. For me, that meant when the opportunity to make a yarn bomb presented itself, I jumped at it. The only problem is that I don’t really have a lot of time to do it, so it is what I think of as an “emergent” yarn bomb. One that must be done now, or not at all.

I have come to love making yarn bombs, but I didn’t always realize the potential of the form. I thought that there were better, more important things a crocheter could do with her yarn. Eventually, however, I came to the realization that van Gogh, Mastisse, Pollock, Warhol, and Miro never worried about whether their work was useful–they made what they made and moved on.

It took me awhile to not only grasp this concept of “crochet for crochet’s sake,” but this past fall when I completed two additional Day of the Dead yarn bombs and put them up with the previous year’s yarn bomb for the same holiday, I got a greater sense of the power of the yarn bomb:

So it was with this potential in mind that I got to work on my “emergent” yarn bomb.

The first hurdle I faced was finding yarns to use.

Due to the last minute nature of the project, I didn’t have time to wait for an order of yarn to come in. I also didn’t have the colors I needed in my stash, so I went online and found that the JoAnn stores in Albuquerque had, after many weeks of being closed, opened, and they even had curbside service.

I placed my order, got my yarn, and then set to work.

I started by getting the graph for the bottom right corner done, and began crocheting:

With thirteen-and-a-half panels yet to be made, I have some work ahead of me, and I will move toward the finished project one stitch at a time.