I first got the idea for this project a little over a year ago.

I had purchased Twinkie Chan’s book, Twinkie Chan’s Crochet Goodies for Fashion Foodies: 20 Yummy Treats to Wear, and I found her designs inspiring on many levels.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Chan’s work, she often draws inspiration from food, and has an amazing ability to capture the essence of the object (in this instance food) and express that essence in crochet.

One of the projects that caught my attention was a crocheted cookie scarf that gave me the idea to make an entire cookieghan. While I initially toyed with the idea of a dozen different cookie designs, I quickly shifted to 13. I like prime numbers and frequently incorporate then in some fashion into my designs, and since 13 is the number in a baker’s dozen, it suited both my personal sensibilities and the overall project.

At the time I had thought it would take a week or two to design the cookies and another two or three weeks to finish the project once the cookies were designed; as it turned out, it took me much longer to settle on the cookies than I had expected, and once I did settled on the sorts of cookies I wished to create in yarn, the process of creating a facsimile was not always straight forward.

Sometimes I was able to create a cookie that could be recognized as such, and sometimes I was not. I also got help from friends, one of whom forwarded this photo of freshly baked cookies to me:

These cookies were the inspiration for my own 13th cookie. I came up with this crocheted version which I think captures the essence (however imperfectly) of the rather luscious looking cookies in the photo:

Here is this latest design with a dozen of it’s crochet cookie compatriots:

I haven’t yet learned everything that this project has to teach me, but I do enjoy this pursuit of the perfect baker’s dozen.