As the middle of summer gives what to the end of summer, AAA baseball is heating up, and as such, I have spent a number of hours at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park the past few days, where it seems you can let a baseball game be your umbrella.

Tonight and last, I left my home near Raleigh where it was raining or threatening to rain, only to arrive at the ballpark to find that the weather, while humid, was not the potential downpour that I had prepared for. There were a few sprinkles, here and there, but that is all they were: sprinkles.

So life and baseball and crochet went on, and as part of that going on, I worked on what I think of as the “crochet linchpin.”

The first order of business was to embroider the crochet piece itself, and while I initially was short on ideas about what to do, I realized that I was limited by the long, low shape of the piece, so I decided on a modest row of flowers.

Inspired by photos of echinacea flowers I came up with this:

Satisfied with the result, I then worked to secure the piece into it’s linchpin position of the crochet panel.

After getting halfway through what was turning out to be a less then satisfactory result, I tried a different approach, and soon enough, I had the piece in place, and I even managed to decorate some of the seams:

With that taken care, I moved onto a more portable project: a thirteen granny square crochet purse.

I had not bothered to read the directions for the tutorial for “A variation on Square C-2” that I had written, so I ended up creating yet another variation, but I didn’t like the way the colors worked together on my first variation on a variation, so today I frogged it a bit and replaced the original fourth round color of shocking pink of the fourth round with tealeaf green and then pressed forward with a fifth round of a discontinued Red Heart Super Saver light fuchsia that I save for special occasions:

I don’t know what kind of weather tomorrow will bring, but I will work toward it, one stitch at a time.