Each day, after I have gotten up, gotten my son to school, eaten my own breakfast, walked the dog, and done whatever it is that absolutely must be done, I make squares, and I make them until I have reached my minimum quota.

Some days I am really lucky, and I either go past the quota, or I have time to weave in ends and start joining pieces.

Today, however, I was just regular lucky instead of really lucky, and I still have seven squares to make to reach the day’s goal before it is my bedtime.

Yesterday (unlike today), I reached my goal before dark.

I had been working on crocheting the squares for one of the corner panels of my state fair project.

My grandmother was as modern as her circumstances would allow, and one of her favorite technologies was the telephone — the subject of one of the corner panels of this year’s project.

My grandmother had what we would now think of as an old-fashioned, black rotary phone, but unlike the phones at my home or in the homes of any of my friends, my grandmother’s phone had an exceedingly long black cord that allowed her to walk through the entire house while she talked to her friends.

My grandmother’s conversations were long and in a language foreign to me. She had never learned to drive, so the telephone was the foundation of her social network, and the friendships, like the cord on her phone, stretched from quite a distance, some all the way back to Ljubinje where my grandmother had been born.

So the telephone was a technology central to my grandmother’s life, and I felt that it had to be included in this picture afghan of my summer’s with her. I had originally designed the blockier, larger phone pictured on the left, but after seeing how it would compare in size to the sycamore trees, I decided I needed to make the phone a little smaller, and I came up with the revised version pictured on the right:

Yesterday, I got busy making the pieces I would need for the phone.

Not only did I make all of the pieces I would need for the phone, I also managed to misplace several of them, so here is what I had when I was in a hurry to get picture before dark:

Tomorrow, my crochet day is going to have to begin with an hour or two of cleaning and organizing.