It sometimes seems to me as if my crochet decluttering efforts will never end, and nothing has happened in the past couple of days to make me think that it will, but as is often true of my efforts, there are occasions I find pieces that bring back very specific crochet memories, and some small textured squares made with the now discontinued Red Heart Super Saver Piñata did exactly that

I had begun the piece after making the a project that I entered in both the 1004 Wilson County Fair and the 2004 North Carolina State Fair. It earned blue ribbons in both competitions, and — after a very late night spent appliquéing the circles to the surface, my mother began referring to the piece as the “Sistine Afghan:”

I had been enchanted by the interplay of the textured squares and after I finished what because my first entry into the state fair, I spent a lot of time exploring all of the different ways this simple design might be used as a building block to create more complicated and interesting designs.

As it happened, I had not yet discovered Clover bent-tipped yarn needles, and I was overwhelmed with the ends to be woven in for each motif, so the pile of squares I had crocheted which includes these eight:

was cast aside, and eventually ended up as part of the yarn slug, and now that I am working on giving the many crochet remnants that have accumulated in my crochet empire a new life, I plan to join them into squares and then crochet a border so that it will be suitable for Project Amigo.

I know that as I continue on this effort to bring order to my crochet empire I will encounter many crochet remnants that bring back many fond crochet memories, and I will work to give them new life, one stitch at a time.