then figure it out.
This was some of the t-shirt wisdom I came in a gift shop at Space Camp one year when I took a moment to survey the goods before getting in my car and leaving my son for the week.
“Go figure it out.”
Good advice I mused.
Good advice that I have been putting to use the past few days as I have tried (with varying degrees of success) since at first my plans were not panning out.
A couple of weeks ago, when I was exhausted from not having slept as much I would have liked the night before, I tried to take a nap, and while I never did fall asleep, the vision for the crochet lunchbox came to me while I was in a state somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, and that vision won’t leave me alone.
So, since that failed afternoon nap, I have been obsessed with the idea of a crochet granny-inspired lunchbox and have worked with every moment that has presented itself to take the vision from nascent idea to actual lunchbox, and while I have made progress in my quest, my first efforts have been stymied by how to work the sides of the lunchbox.
I had been working in standard granny fashion, changing color with each round, but yesterday, I decided to work with one color to streamline the process a bit while I worked out the details of the construction:

and while this created a certain level of efficiency, it also presented two problems:
one, the size of the granny rectangle meant that I had to make a lot more stitches to find out that something wasn’t going to work, and
two, the lack of a change in color meant there was no contrast to highlight what was (or was not) working, so I remedied this by working on a slightly smaller scale, and by changing colors at crucial junctures so that I could get a better sense of how my “solutions” actually looked.
Here is the view into the crochet basket as sunset neared:

and here is a view of the bottom of the crochet basket:

It was definitely an improvement over my previous efforts, most of which were frogged, and while I was not satisfied with it entirely, it did lead me to a better solution which, when the sun rises, I will be able to document, and after that?
I’ll have to figure it out.