Last night, after I pressed the “Publish” button for my blog post, I did a few things around the house, and then went to bed.

While there were still 30 ends or so to be woven in and trimmed, there was no point in staying up to work on them because I knew that as early as my mornings start, I would have the cookieghan completed long before there was sufficient light to get a good photograph of the finished project.

And that is exactly what happened.

So after the ends were woven in and trimmed, I waited for enough sun to stream through the clouds and into my living room, and considered the sequence of events that brought me to this project, a sequence that began in the fall of 1968 when I entered the 3rd grade.

Here is how we looked then:

I have many fond memories of the third grade, but what I didn’t know at the time, and what did not reveal itself completely until last summer when I finished work on my first Cookieghan, was that one of the associations I had made so long ago was going to have a profound impact on my crochet life.

(I am in the front row, second from the left, and the friend who is responsible for my crochet cookie obsession is also in the front row with two long pigtails and a red sweater.)

In 2010, when many of us in Mrs. Cook’s long ago third grade class began to turn 50, I decided that I really wanted to make something for my friend, and knowing that she, like her mother before her, was a skilled cookie baker, I decided that something based on cookies would be a just the thing.

At the time, I had imagined it would take me just eight weeks or so to design and execute the project. Eighteen months later, I finally finished work on it and sent to her so she could use it as she saw fit:

After I had packed it up and sent it off, I had thought that I would never make another cookieghan.

But the cookies would not leave me alone, and when I began work on this year’s state fair piece I found myself working on the second rendition of the cookieghan.

As with most things I do, the second rendition got just a little more complicated than the first, but just eleven-and-a-half-weeks after I tied the first slip knot for the first crochet cookie I would make for Cookieghan 2.0, it was done.

Here is a detail of the finished project:

And here is an overview of the completed piece with all of the ends woven in and trimmed:

I can assure my readers that on that picture day so many years ago, I had many ideas of what I wanted to do with my life and crocheting cookies was not one of them, but today as I finished work on this most recent rendition, I know that these cookies and I are not quite done with each other, and I can hardly wait to see what is next.