For me, the first of August signals not just the middle of summer, but the beginning of what I think of as “crochet season.”

It is the day that my focus turns to what project I will work on to enter in the state fair, and this year marks the third year that I will be working on a project dedicated to my paternal grandmother, Nora Buchta Stahlhut.

Born in 1899, she experienced many changes in what was to be a relatively short life. Denied the opportunity to go to school past the 8th grade, she did, however, live long enough to see women gain the right to vote and the end of World War II.

She did not, however, live long enough to meet me, and this “not knowing” of someone without whom I would not exist is something that has captured my attention for decades.

I look at the artifacts I have of her life — a locket, a letter, glass tumblers, a clock, a red wallet, a rocking chair, a table, an embroidered tablecloth — and I try to imagine what her life was like and what she was like.

And I have spent more than twenty-four weeks over the course of two years trying to do just that (which, if you need or want a refresher you can read these seventy-one blog posts on the topic), but before I can turn my full attention to this project, I have some loose ends to tie up, the most urgent of which is turning these crochet hexagons into a functional purse:

I started by joining all but the side seams of the future crochet purse:

which left me with more than a few ends to weave in:

but weave them in I did,and when that was done, I trimmed them all:

Now all that is left to do is make a template for the lining, line the bag, and then finish putting it altogether, and hopefully, when it is done, it will be just the thing to carry my crochet tools with me wherever I go.