I want to start this blog post by thanking the many people who have offered their condolences to me and my family — both immediate and far flung. The entire community of Edwardsville and Lois and Mike’s many friends have been impacted by the deaths of my cousin and her husband, and a lot of people will have to step up to fill the many shoes they wore to keep things running. Now that they are gone, there are a lot of pieces that will need picking up, and picking up the pieces is exactly where I found myself with my crochet.

I started by completing the first round of rehab for these sixteen substitute crochet remnants:

That effort was interrupted by a need to run some errands as I prepare to go to Edwardsville, and while I was running one of those errands, I came across this Red Heart Super Saver variegated yarn, designed to work especially well with the crochet technique known as “pooling”:

I had no particular interest in trying to develop any new crochet skill at the moment, but I did love the color way.

Honestly, how could you go wrong with a color way called “papaya”? An assortment of many of my favorite colors all rolled into one, it goes with just about anything:

It is really almost a neutral.

With the second round of rehab done, I left the many ends as they were, knowing that it would be the perfect thing to work on as I travel to and from Edwardsville. It does not need a traveling yarn stash or natural light to work by, so it is, as crochet projects go, fairly self-contained.

But before I go, I’d like to find the original sixteen remnants for which these are standing in, and to that end, I started straightening up by documenting these thirty-five six-inch crochet squares, so that they are ready to be packed up and sent off to begin their journey to Colima, Mexico:

The lives of my cousin and her husband are over, but their work is not done, and as I move forward in my life, I want to devote some of my time to helping further their dreams, one stitch at a time.