Spring isn’t here — yet. But with the days growing longer, the nights growing shorter, and the plants transitioning from their winter nakedness to what will be their spring pageantry, I am preparing by doing what I think of as my pre-spring cleaning.

Yesterday that meant opening boxes and sorting through the many bins that I was packing up last year at this time. Today, it meant going through the things that I found yesterday and making decisions about what to do with them until I ran out of decision making reserves.

Then I got back to work on my journey to a thousand crochet squares.

I decided that the first thing I needed to do was figure out how many squares I have left to make.

After checking through my records of squares sent and then counting the squares in assorted nooks and crannies, I arrived at a number of 252, but rather than choose my next “nine patch” I dove into two bins that I had sorted through just 24 hours earlier, and put all the crochet remnants from those bins into one bag.

Next, I pulled out twenty-five fairly easy to rehab remnants:

and I wove in and trimmed the few ends that needed weaving in and trimming:

Then, in a counterintuitive move, I set them aside.

I set them aside because I had two renegade remnants each of which had been part of two separate nine-patch rehabs:

With my yarn stash and hooks at my side, I got to work, and (miraculously, to my mind) I got them both done with a minimum of frogging:

and with these two remnants, now marked as “ta-done,” some of the mental space I need to juggle work on the remaining 250 crochet squares was freed up. But before I put them into one of the “to be sent to Project Amigo” stacks, I got a picture of each renegade rehabbed remnant with the nine-patch it was originally from:

I still don’t know exactly where I am going with these remnants, but as of this afternoon, I am three-quarters of the way there, and I will continue the journey, one stitch at a time.