embroidery flowers

I get in a crochet groove

Leslie Stahlhut

The past couple of weeks I have been left with the sense that I am, on some level, simply spinning my crochet wheels, but today, it felt as if those crochet wheels had finally found a crochet groove.

More times than I care to count, I have come close to finishing one of the pieces of what is shaping up to be my 2015 North Carolina State Fair, and then I discover something that didn’t work: it is the wrong size, I used yarn from two obviously different dye lots for one piece, the idea that was great in my head doesn’t quite work out when executed in yarn, but today, for the first time in a long while, almost everything went right.

I started with what are destined (I hope) to the be the four corners of the piece:

four crochet circle motifs
My progress on the four corners of my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project as of 8:17 am, August 30, 2015

I had struggled to embroider the edge of the circle that is in the bottom right of the above photo, but last night, while my beloved Durham Bulls were getting trounced by the Charlotte Knights, I had a crochet epiphany, and today when I resumed work on the circles, I made measurably faster progress:

four crochet circle motifs with embroidery
The same four corners about nine-and-one-half hours later after I found my crochet groove

and while the four corners are not yet done, and there are plenty of details about the center embroidery to be worked out, I did make substantive and sustained progress.

With the four corners coming together, I then turned my attention to the six long-stemmed water tumblers that were my paternal grandmother’s and which had been given to her by her maternal grandmother, Elisa Hill. At some point over the weekend I had finished them, but when the sun rose on the new day, I still had a number of ends to weave in:

water tumbler crochet motifs with ends to weave in
The six long-stemmed tumblers with ends in need of weaving in

Using my trusty Clover bent-tipped yarn needle I got to work, and through the seeming  magic of my new found crochet groove, in short order, all of the ends were woven in, and I may have even figured out how these pieces will be joined to the project as a whole:

water tumbler crochet motifs
My great-great grandmother Elisa Hill’s long-stemmed tumblers

and at the end of the day, I still had a little time left to start work on a crochet representation of the locket that was given to my grandmother on the occasion of her 15th birthday:

locket crochet motif
A view of the outside of the crochet locket-to-be
locket crochet motif
A view of the inside of the locket-to-be

Tomorrow, when the demands of the week claim my time, I will have to remember that a weekend like the one just passed is the exception, not the rule, and I will have to keep in mind that progress is only made one stitch at a time.