A simple request from a fellow crafter in Connecticut:

would you be interested in knitting or crocheting five inch or six inch squares

has turned into my latest crochet vocation: taking unrelated squares I have crocheted and which have lain dormant — often for years — from crochet oblivion to crochet purpose.

It started with the five and six-inch squares that are now destined for Project Amigo, but the act of unearthing those squares showed me that I also have many seven, eight, and even nine and ten-inch crochet squares in search of a purpose.

So this weekend, I continued to concentrate my efforts on the seven-inch squares, and eventually, I got to the point that I could make a table runner, and in the increasingly later afternoon light of this past Friday afternoon, I laid out the squares I had rehabbed — sometimes making them larger, sometimes making them smaller, and sometimes just making them more square — I took this photo:

I had wanted to see how they would look laid out, and while I was pleased with the progress I had made and how the squares looked together, I was thrown into an existential (for me) quandary about how to join them. Eventually, however, I was able to set my existential doubts aside and just keep working on the squares that await purpose and transformation.

Sometimes this means going through piles of already crochet squares with a ruler at the ready, and sometimes it means identifying promising bits of other squares:

as I did with the nine-patch of two-round grannies that I made for my never-ending state fair project, but which now have no place there:

This square is a new favorite of mine, and I am certain that the techniques I employed in making it will show up again in other projects, but in the mean time, I have taken hook to yarn and done what I can to finish some of the future squares that are, at the moment, in various stages of realization:

I don’t really know what this project will look like when it is done, or how many transformations it will undergo as I bring it to fruition, but I know that I will continue to work the only way possible: one stitch at a time.