The past few days I have been working with my youngest son to get him set up to start his new school year. While he completed his undergraduate studies last May, he liked college so well he decided to keep going, and since he is now setting up his own household, I found myself making a crochet detour.

I often don’t now how I lived without crochet. What did I use for a blanket? Where did I get my pot holders? And what, pray tell, did I do for a tote or a soccer ball? I don’t know, but I have come to think that crochet has a solution for every problem, and the problem vexing us over the past few days was this: where could we put the plastic bags that collect as a result of shopping?

I went straight to the internet in search of a solution, and I found a free pattern for a crochet monster. It is functional, adorable, and uses yarn scraps. What more could a crafter want?

So while I did get some work done on my 2019 New Mexico State Fair piece, most of the crochet I’ve worked on since my last blog post had centered on the crochet monster.

As luck would have it, I am traveling with a sizable stash of scraps, so even though I am about 1800 miles for my crochet home base, I was able to get started, and here is how the future monster looked last night as the last of the sun was still in the sky:

Because I tend toward the overly optimistic when it comes to imaging how much work I will get done, I had seriously thought I would get this finished in time for tonight’s blog post, but because life is life, and I am dreadful at figuring out how much time a task will take me, this was how far I got instead:

I still need to weave in ends, crochet two more monster horns, two more monster eyes, a mouth piece, two legs, and two arms, but I am moving forward, one stitch at a time on this delightful crochet detour.