Stash down challenge 2012: Day 12 — meditation on untangling

Leslie Stahlhut

In honor of Veterans’ Day, today was a school holiday.

It was not, however, a holiday for the orthodontist, and as my youngest son finds the paperwork associated with missing even one minute of school to be too onerous to bear, we take advantage of these days when school is out and the orthodontist’s office is open to schedule my son’s longer, more complicated appointments, which is why I spent a generous portion of my morning at the orthodontist’s office.

And as I knew I would have at least 90 uninterrupted minutes with no computer or wi-fi to distract me, I brought along a project that had been bedeviling me.

Originally intended to be a large yellow Starling handbag made from rug yarn I had acquired in a massive yarn purchase that was the precipitating event for my first stash down challenge, I quickly discovered that I did not have enough yellow yarn to complete the project as I had envisioned it, so I unraveled the project to its base, and began working up the sides again adding blue and red squares of varied sizes to give the whole thing an Mondrian air to it.

Here is how far I got with it as of early December last year:

crocheting the bottom of a yellow purse and adding red and blue accents
I begin adding blocks of red and blue to the once yellow carpetbag-to-be

In the intervening months, I would at a row here, and a row there, so that by the time this year’s stash down challenge rolled around, it looked like this:

An overview of crocheting with yarn bobbins
The unfinished large Starling crochet bag from my 2011 stash down challenge

Today, determined that I will finish this bag by November 30, 2012 when this year’s stash down challenge officially ends, I set out to take the first steps toward that goal.

By the ends of the day, the interior tangles were more numerous:

A crochet project where the yarn bobbins got a bit tangled
An overview of the large Starling bag I began last November with a tangle of red, blue, and yellow yarn

but I had also made measurable progress working my way up the side of the crochet bag to-be:

Progress on the yellow crochet purse with red and blue accents
I make progress on the large Starling crochet bag I began last November

As for the day’s African flower hexagon motif, I did not get to it until mid-afternoon. The sky was, as it had been all day, clouded over, but the light and the temperature both were just right. Despite several interruptions, I finished the hexagon in relatively short order:

An African flower crochet hexagon with an orange border
The fifth African flower crochet hexagon in a series of as-yet undetermined length

and then joined it to the four, already completed hexagons:

five African flower crochet hexagons joined with a whipstitch
Day 5 of my African flower crochet hexagon meditation

I expect that tomorrow, will, like today, be somewhat hectic, but my hope is that despite that, I am able to continue to work through the tangles and make progress on the large Starling handbag.