This past weekend I spent more hours than I would have liked packing. I suppose the easiest way to remedy this would be to have fewer things, but once you have things, it can be hard to reverse course, and I am coming to believe that we don’t own our stuff, but rather, our stuff owns us.

A case in point is my seemingly unending quest to use the crochet remnants that I “own” and rehab them into five and six-inch crochet squares for Project Amigo. My goal is to make a thousand squares to be used in crochet blankets for Project Amigo.

I arrived at the goal of rehabbing so many remnants when I started going through my collection of crochet pieces that lacked a purpose and discovered that I had at least several hundred, and when I finish work on the most recently identified fifty-two remnants, I will be very close to having completed work on nine hundred of my one thousand crochet square goal.

By the time I am done, it will have taken me a year-and-a-half to complete the project, and I am starting to reflect on the lessons learned over the course of all this time.

First, things, like sentient beings, require care. Even a crochet remnant needs to be somewhere dry in order to thrive. If it gets dirty, you will have to clean it, and if it is not under your constant watchful eye (say an afghan on the sofa), it can be damaged by a beloved pet or the elements.

Another problem is that if you have too much stuff, you may miss out on the things you have that are valuable to you trying to take care of the things you have that don’t mean as much.

Case in point: I found a box of kiddles I purchased to be used in a project I had the vaguest of ideas for. I have yet to figure out the details of the project, but with so much stuff, even things that are important can get lost in the shuffle, so while I did very little crochet this weekend what crochet I did do:

was done for the purpose of helping me to clear the decks so that I can figure out what will be next, moving forward one stitch at a time.