Whenever I embark on a project, I try to imagine all of the possible problems I might encounter along the way; I then try to solve these potential problems before I actually encounter them, and while I continue to persist in thinking that one day I will get a project figured out from start to finish before I ever pick up a hook, the truth is, this strategy has its limits, and today I was reminded of those limits and the fact that often we don’t learn by thinking, but by doing.

As my regular readers know, I crocheted 169 cookies, which as it happens, is a baker’s dozen of a baker’s dozen.

Now that the cookies are completed, I have begun the work of joining them, and as I was working on joining the 57th cookie, I had an insight that would make joining the remaining swirl cookies much simpler for me.

Five cookies later, as I joined cookie number 62 (a gingersnap), I had yet another revelation.

This time it was about using a strand of yarn to mark the first stitch of the last increase round of any given cookie so that the stitch could be found immediately and without much thought. Had I don this in the first place, I would have saved myself a lot of aggravation.

But the fact is. when you are designing a project, you there isn’t really any way you can accurately (or reasonably) foresee every imaginable problem, and even if you could, there are always the unimaginable problems that crop up and cause their own brand of trouble.

Today I managed to weave in all the loose ends, correct a joining that I had made before I bought an extra 24 stitch markers to see me through this effort, and add 13 additional cookies to the cookieghan:

And with any luck (and a lot of focused work), I am hoping that I complete at least one more row of the cookieghan tomorrow.