With the baskets completed and the pollen everywhere, I have spent most of my time indoors either attempting to bring order to the chaos with the help of said baskets or working on the piece for my 2014 World Cup soccer ball.

Inspired by the flags at the opening ceremonies of the recent Olympics, I had been tossing the idea around for a couple of months before I finally took hook to yarn and began to work out the details.

Sometimes the details work out smoothly and on the first try, and sometimes you have to try to convert the flag of Cameroon:

into a pentagon that accurately evokes the original rectangle, and you run into some problems.

Happily for me, my first, less successful effort propelled me to my more accurately evocative result:

With Cameroon completed, I hurried to work on the flag of Ghana, the configuration or which provided similar challenges, eventually, I came up with this:

Ready to set aside the complexity of working a three striped pentagon with a star at it’s center, I retreated to the relative ease of a plain orange pentagon to pair with my horizontal stripe hexagon for the Netherlands:

and I even had enough time left over to add a hexagon inspired by the French flag to my collection of tri-color vertically striped flags:

There are plenty of crochet challenges for me to meet with this project, and I will tackle them the only way a person can: one stitch at a time.