The journey of a thousand crochet squares is, in some ways, an ideal project. You have the almost instant gratification of fashioning individual motifs from remnants, coupled with the larger goal of one thousand squares which will keep you occupied for awhile, and to my joy, I am finding that as I go along, the pile of crochet remnants from which I have to choose grows slimmer and slimmer.

My recent foray into two of my most immediately available boxes of crochet pieces turned up this:

which (as of this afternoon) had been transformed into this:

It was very satisfying to take these forty-one crochet remnants that were prone to chaotic tangling and turn them into nine, usable five-inch crochet squares that will become part of a blanket, and with that in mind, I returned to the two boxes that have given me so much to work with, and from those slimmer pickings, I found twelve more candidates for rehab:

As with the last batch of remnants, there was one nine-patch of one-round granny squares. There was also a three-round granny square left over from a long ago permutations cat runner project (top row, leftmost square) and four granny squares (bottom row of above photo) that I had once planned to use in the center panel of what is now my 2018 North Carolina State Fair project.

Obviously that idea didn’t work out as expected, but with this one thousand squares project, the effort I put into making something that didn’t ultimately work out will not be squandered, and as I pieced together the nine patch and took out the whip stitches that joined the four four-round granny squares I found that in order to make progress, I had to move both forward and backward.

Before sunset, I had the twelve new remnants ready for the final push to finish:

At this point, I am not yet to the 500 square mark, but I am somewhere in the middle of something that is going to take awhile, and I am looking forward to taking these many bits of my crochet life, and turning them into something of value, one stitch at a time.