I awoke this morning with just 67 days between me and October 10, 2011, the last day to turn in my as-yet-to-be-determined project for this year’s North Carolina State Fair, but before I could turn my attention to the project, I had household business to take of.

Last night as I got ready for bed, I found an impressive water leak in the house. Once I had mopped up the mess and determined the source, I found that the only way to attend to it at that late hour was to put water in a pitcher for the morning’s coffee, turn off the water to the entire house, and go to bed.

So while I waited for the plumber today, I focused my crochet on another household improvement: a third set of chair leg socks for another one of the kitchen chairs.

The first three socks I made finished off a small ball of yarn that had been in one of my myriad stash bags. When I went to get a skein of what I thought was the correct color, I found that it was a bit warmer than the other three:

I drew two lessons from this. One, if it is really important that the color be an exact match, be sure to get yarn from the same dye lot.

Second, there are instances in which it really doesn’t matter if things match perfectly, it only matters they work.

By mid-afternoon, the plumber had arrived, done his plumbing magic, and I was once again free to ruminate about my as-yet-undetermined project.

I am very much tempted by the yo-yo (or “puff”) pattern on page 27 of Melody Griffith’s book, Crocheted Afghans.

Before I learned to crochet, I made fabric yo-yos by the thousands. Most of them are in a box waiting to be joined into one massive yo-yo quilt, but 529 of them comprise this small quilt I made so that my youngest son would learn his colors:

The joining stitches were not as durable as they needed to be, so the yo-yo quilt is in need of many small repairs, but this project taught me the power of repeating a simple motif and the way that repetition can transform the ordinary into something transcendent.

So with the yo-yo quilt of nearly 14 years ago fresh in my mind, I made a few more yo-yos to get a feel for how a much larger project would look:

Now I need to decide if I will make the yo-yos from solid color yarn or variegated yarn, and no matter which decision I make, I will wonder if it was the right one.