Last Wednesday when I woke up in a hotel near LAX, I had more than 12 hours to fill before my flight left. For weeks I had been mulling what to do with the gap in my schedule, and I decided that the most sensible thing was to get in my rental car and go on the road to Joshua Tree.

I had found a friend from seventh grade willing to join me on this trek, and shortly before one-thirty in the afternoon, we pulled into the parking lot of the World Famous Crochet Museum where we met a fellow crochet enthusiast who offered to take our photo:

The adventure was delightful and beyond what I had expected (you can read about the museum visit here). In a room filled with thousands upon thousands of crochet stitches made by so many hands, I was both in awe of what had been accomplished and worried that I might not be able to find the time to crochet everything I want to crochet.

After the tour, I decided that I need to crochet something with aluminum cans, I also need to crochet a watermelon slice and a banana split, and finally, I need to crochet a mermaid — or two.

But these are future crochet needs.

My present crochet need is to finish a crochet purse that I started many moons ago, and yesterday and today, I made progress on that effort.

It is an effort that involves a lot of what I call “color work,” and it sometimes takes me several tries before I find the exact right color, but eventually I do.

Here is the work I got done on Friday:

and here is a visual catalog of my progress on Saturday and Sunday:

As always the element that I don’t often document is the crochet that was done and then ultimately frogged.

Now the only dilemma facing me is this:

I had completely forgotten that I had experimented with a smaller, tidier square, and now before I move onto finishing the fourth round, I have one more decision to make.