Today was a long, strange day that began very early.

I awoke to the sound of my alarm (as usual), and a sky illuminated by lightning (not so usual), and while it was not the most productive of crochet days, I did (as I sorted through the piles of things that needed sorting) find some long-forgotten crochet treasures (at least to me).

While sorting myriad yarn scraps by color family, I came across this:

A simple, but I think elegant, square I designed one day while I waited at my son’s trumpet lesson. I had gotten the idea for it about two lessons previous, but there were small details to work out that gave me fits. I was thrilled when I got all of the bugs worked out, and just last week, I was wondering where it was.

As I cleared layer up on layer of all manner of yarn and motifs, I eventually reached this:

Begun shortly after I completed Melody MacDuffee’s Overlay crochet course (then available through correspondence; now available at Scribd), I have no idea how I made it, but I am pleased with the result.

The last item of interest I unearthed were the pieces to a project I think of as a cat runner, the purpose of which is to protect the sofa in the photo from Stripes, the cat who is also in the photo:

In an effort to de-fur the sofa, I bought this new product (which works spectacularly well):

and began piecing together the squares needed to complete this “cat runner,” a kind of protective layer to reduce the amount of cat hair embedded in the sofa:

By the time the sun set, the rain had cleared and pollen had begun to fall, dusting the world in a coat of yellow, and now, as I write this post, the clouds have rolled in, and the cycle is beginning anew.