When we left our regularly scheduled Thursday night blog post, I had finished sixteen of the rounds needed for the thirty-six round granny square blanket I am making for a friend’s granddaughter.

I woke up Friday determined to get even further, and — working from a bin where I have put all of the sale yarn I bought to make this project (and a few others) — I finished four more rounds:

Thankfully, no gremlins came in the night to unravel my work, and Saturday, I woke up ready to tackle the sixteen remaining rounds. With a cup of coffee at my side and a hook in my hand I got to work.

I took a break to run some Saturday errands and by the time I returned to the patio where I now crochet, there was enough shade for me to resume my efforts to work the blanket, and I almost finished the twenty-fifth round:

But almost finished isn’t the same as being being finished, and the thing about working a large granny square is this: the further you go, the more time each round takes.

So the 3-dc granny shells to be completed on round twenty-five were just as many stitches are there were in the first two rounds of the blanket. But all that meant is that I just needed to keep moving forward. One stitch here, another stitch there.

Eventually they all those stitches added up, and by the time the sun was ready to set on the weekend, I had achieved a measure of progress that satisfied me, even it didn’t appear visually impressive.

Impressive or not, it was progress:

and, I even had the ends woven in and trimmed.

As I work on the last eight rounds of this great granny square baby blanket, I have time to think about all of the moments that came before this one where I find myself.

Time to think about my third grade teacher, Mrs. Cook, and the reading group she put me in where I met my friend Laurie, and how after many more years had passed than I could even imagine when I was eight-years-old and we first met, I would find myself making a blanket for the granddaughter of little girl I once played with.

As for Laurie’s granddaughter, she is just seven years away from starting the third grade, and if she is as lucky as I am, she will meet a friend there who will last a lifetime.