In Raleigh, North Carolina, where I live, today is the longest day of the year, and it is the thought of this day that keeps me going when, in December, the days are shorter and colder, and the nights seem to stretch on forever.

It also marks six weeks until I begin work on my state fair piece, and I am confident with the progress that I have made over the past two years, I will actually finish it this year.

But in the meantime, I need to clear the crochet decks to prepare for August, and two things I want to have done before that day arrives are get my myriad yarn scraps in some kind of order and to complete the pounce of rainbow scrap cats I have begun.

The past couple of days I have made substantive progress on the first goal, combining two recently unearthed balls of medium length yarn scraps. Here it one of the yarn balls before they were joined:

And here is how it appeared after they were combined with a few random medium length yarn scraps that had been serving as decorative elements on my sofa worked in:

With the progress made on the medium scrap yarn ball front, I focused my crochet efforts on the bright orchid scrap cat.

I love the scrap cats, but they resist all efforts to get them done in a hurry which drives me crazy, but also — I believe — adds to their charm.

So stitch by stitch, scrappy yarn end by scrappy yarn end, I moved forward, and before the sun set on this longest of days:

If I were to use an unadulterated strand of yarn without any knots, let alone hundreds, crocheting the cats would go much more quickly, but stripped of the remnants of projects past that are worked into each cat, something greater than the time I put into them would be lost.