The Sublime Perfection of the Granny Square

I should be packing. Or cleaning. Or doing something that is not what I am doing.

And what I am doing is contemplating the beauty of a granny square. The one pictured above is one I began working on over a decade ago when I was trying to use up some of the many yarn scraps I had acquired. I wanted to create something from the tangle of scraps I had and see if I could make the disparate colors behave nicely with each other.

Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed and had to unravel my work and try again, and sometimes I just plowed forward anyway.

Using what you have

The truth is, when it comes to yarn, I have a lot more than I need. I have what is known in fiber circles as SABLE: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. What this means in practical terms is that if you ply your fiber craft every day and live to be 150, there will still be yarn leftover.

My yarn holdings accumulated as they did, in part, because during my early crochet years, I did not just “use what I had.” For me the perfect project required the perfect color of yarn, and I would go to store after store after store in search of a green that was just like the green painted walls at my favorite Mexican restaurant. The green was perfect, just like their chili poblanos.