Separating the crochet wheat from the crochet chaff

Leslie Stahlhut

This past March I moved from a house I had been living in for almost twelve years. It was the first step in an effort to “downsize,” but due to time constraints and an inability to separate the “crochet wheat” from the “crochet chaff,” I did not downsize my crochet empire so much as pack it into lidded plastic bins which I then put in storage.

This weekend, I confronted a storage demon, and for once, I won:

An empty storage unit
An empty storage unit

While the storage facility is gated, it is not climate controlled. In the fall a mixture of dirt and wayward leaves find their way under the door, in the spring the ever present very yellow pollen blows in, in the winter it is very cold, and in the summer it is very hot.

And this past week as I went through my many bins in an effort to kickstart my downsizing, I spent more time than I would have liked at what I came to call “hot storage.”

I don’t know if it was simply the sting of the sweat trickling into eyes that allowed me to see things more clearly, but I found that where just four months ago I had hemmed and hawed or found myself thinking “If I just changed these fifteen things it would be perfect!” I know had a heretofore unknown clarity and while I have yet to completely complete “the great sorting,” as I have come to think of it, I made progress.

Unfortunately this progress wrestling with my storage demon and my crochet empire did impinge on my time to crochet so rather than getting done the fifteen or so squares I had hopped to complete, I instead made progress on these four crochet remnants:

Three more five-inch crochet squares and a fourth nearly completion]
Three more five-inch crochet squares and a fourth nearly completion]

and, after some missteps, I finally got on the right track squaring of this crochet circle:

Squaring off a DOTS crochet circle
Squaring off a DOTS crochet circle

I had originally thought that it was left over from my 2006 North Carolina State Fair project which used circles with 32 stitches in the final round:

another view of my 2006 state fair blanket made with crochet circles
Another view of my 2006 North Carolina State Fair Afghan

When in fact it was left over from a DOTS inspired crochet blanket which had 30 stitches in the final round:

All but one of the crochet dots for the crochet dots blanket
All but one of the crochet dots for Dotghan 1.5

I still have a number of bins to sort through, but it now seems to me that I just might get it done after all — one bin at a time.

Related posts: Crochet Circles Throw
Then there were three

2 thoughts on “Separating the crochet wheat from the crochet chaff”

  1. Hello. Are you keeping your storage?I make round cousins for insulation.they look like giant caterpillers but they work!

  2. What a chore ! Good for you. I recently threw out a big plastic bag full of bits and pieces and felt very guilty. I had to keep telling myself – “you will never use this.”
    At least now you can focus on what you have and make some decisions.

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