Art with a capital “A” is not expected to have a purpose outside of existing, but purposefulness has a power all it’s own, and now that I have spent over a year transforming crochet remnants that had been doing nothing but causing me angst )should I frog them and use the yarn, should I join them into one of those random willy nilly pieces that are fun to look at in book but aren’t something I would want in my house, or should I just stuff them somewhere cold and hope they work as insulation?), I have discovered that there is an intrinsic power to purposefulness.

When I began, the remnants I worked with were, for the most part, fully formed squares that simply weren’t five or six inches in size, so the rehabs often involved a little frogging and reworking before the square was on its way. Here is an assortment of those early square earmarked for rehab:

As the year wore on and I worked my way through the larger remnants, the pieces I worked with got smaller or more complicated in some fashion, so the transformations have not been as quick. They require more piecing or more crochet and are, on the whole, a bit more fussy, but after all is said and done, I find that they are worth the fuss:

However, all of this crochet rehabbing leaves me with a number of yarn scraps which — because I want them to have purpose — I dutifully turn into “magic yarn balls”. As of this morning, I had three of these scrap yarn balls:

but with just a bit of effort I had them all tied together and rolled into one big “magic yarn ball”:

and when the time is right, I will dig up my scrap yarn ripple afghan:

and work to give the yarn scraps the same intrinsic power of purposefulness that I gave the remnants they come from, and I will do it the only way possible: one stitch at a time.