I am terrible at estimating how long a project will take to complete, so today rather than trying to figure out how long it would take me to complete a task, I decided to see what I could get done in a specific period of time.

After a morning spent working on a variety of crochet projects (finishing the fifth of 10 washrags for project 8, all of which need to arrive in Pensacola, Florida before July 3; making another soccer ball pentagon so I could measure the gauge before joining; starting on 5 more African Flower Hexagons so I can take pictures that demonstrate how I went about joining the pentagon to the hexagons), I decided that it was time to take the “Big Rug” out of hiding and start working again toward finishing it.

To that end, I selected five squares in varying degrees of doneness. All five of the squares are being made using yarn salvaged from the first incarnation of the “Big Rug,” and as such, require a minimum of three needlefelted joins per square as I described here.

This is what my squares-to-be looked like before I sat down for two hours of almost uninterrupted crochet:

One hundred and twenty minutes and six needlefelted joins later, this is what I had achieved:

One one level, the three squares did not seem like much, but when I step back and consider that I had not worked one stitch on this project in over two weeks, the increase in productivity as applied to this project had increased infinitely.

When I find myself in the throes of a large project (they always start out much smaller and then expand), it can be hard to be satisfied with the small bits of progress that move a project forward.

But it is these small bits, joined together over time, that eventually comprise the whole.

So for now, I am going to commit to one square a day, no matter what.

It might not be a huge number, but at that rate, it will only take me another 170 days to have all the squares I will need to make the rug, and that is less time than has passed since I began this project.