On this journey of a thousand crochet squares, the goal and the crochet deadline that come with it (Bastille Day 2019) are both arbitrary. I made them up myself, but despite the fact that no one on this planet asked me to make a thousand crochet squares from my bazillion remnants by Sunday, July 14, 2019, I still feel an obligation to get them done.

Some of the obligation is to myself. Every crochet remnant turned into a square is time and resources that are saved and salvaged. It is not someone else’s responsibility to clean up my trail of crochet pieces. I have even been advised by one of my sons that if, one day, the task of sorting through my things falls to him, there will be no sorting. There will just be a big dumpster in front of the house, and he will fill it and hire it hauled away.

So there’s that.

The other obligation I feel is to the people of Colima. I am essentially being invited into their homes. With the knowledge that there are people who would simply gather my stuff and put it it in dumpster, I am honored that there are also people for whom the things I make hold value, and it is those people I think of when I weave in the ends and frog to get the size just right so that the joining goes smoothly for the person who will assemble the squares into blankets.

As much as I have done, this is not all my own effort, and on the journey of a thousand crochet squares, I am now nine squares closer.

I began the weekend having gotten this far:

Because of a design choice I made, there were more than the usual number of ends to weave in on two of the squares, but eventually, I got that done, and the squares were travel ready:

Which meant that I needed to find some more remnants. I decided that I would use the need for remnants to clear out a corner that had what could most charitably be termed “random bag buildup,” and so I sorted through those bags and found these eighteen remnants that I intend to turn into twelve crochet squares:

When I started this project, I had no idea how many crochet remnants I had, and I have come across many bits that have refreshed my memory of crochet projects past, and with seven days and thirty-six squares to go, I will keep moving forward, one stitch at a time.