I have a habit of taking my crochet with me wherever I go. I don’t take it all with me, but I do take what I like to think of as a small, curated selection. I like to use the word “curated” because it sounds more dignified than “putting the latest thing I am working on in a plastic bag so it doesn’t get all jumbled in my purse,” and because the truth is, it is curated. Before I put anything in the plastic bag du jour, I have to think about where I am going and what limitations I will face, because crocheting in public requires you to consider your surroundings.

At home I can spread out and do as I please. When I am in public, I am–as the word “public” suggests–sharing space with others. I might be in a waiting room or an airport or I might be sitting at a table, but wherever I decide to set up camp, I have to think of the people around me.

When I am in a waiting room, I can often spread out a bit and can sometimes take over a nearby chair in addition to whatever seat I have for myself. When I am in an airport, as the boarding time nears, space is often at an increasingly greater premium, so I need something that contracts as I work on it. When I take a project to lunch, I generally have to work on smaller projects. Sometime those projects sometimes attract comment, and sometimes I use the opportunity to solicit input.

Such was the case with Olivette–the mini meta crochet pig.

I drove to Mountainair, New Mexico, on Friday, and because of the time of day, I stopped at a restaurant for lunch. There was a little girl whose mother worked at the restaurant, and the little girl seemed to know her way around the place. I asked her mother if I could get some input on my mini meta crochet pig design (without using the words “mini” or “meta”) and the girl’s mother said yes.

When I showed the little girl a photo of Olivette, she seemed quite taken with her. Unable to tell if she actually liked Olivette, or if she was simply thrilled to have someone to talk to, I asked her what, if anything she would change, and when I put it to her that way, she advised me that blue and red pajamas would be better than red and white, so with that in mind, I got to work on a second Olivette, and I got this far before the sun set on my weekend:

The other project I am currently working on that is sufficiently portable to be something I can take when I am crocheting in public is a third crochet Viking helmet, but instead of a newborn size, I am working on the extra large adult size.

I like to start the larger Viking helmets by working on the horns because they require a lot of counting, and the exquisite shape of the horn is the result of the careful staggering of hdc and sc stitches for all 34 rounds of the largest horn:

Unfortunately, because there is so much back and forth in terms of which stitch to make, it can be hard to visually keep track of where you are, and I find that using strands of yarn to mark the first stitch of each round saves me a lot of frogging and potential aggravation:

With a nearly done crochet pig, and one of two crochet horns for a Viking helmet made, I will continue the march toward the new year, one stitch at a time.