I’d like to report a case of missing crojo. It was last seen on Thursday enjoying a glass of wine on the living room sofa during family tv time.

If you see my missing crojo, will you please send it home to me?

Usually when this happens it’s a sign that I have too many projects started, none of which are making my hooky heart sing.

The solution is declaring yarn bankruptcy. It’s a thing, y’all. You just throw your hands up in the air and say, “I give up.” No shame. No judgment.

Just: I surrender to the chaos that is my creative life.

It is what it is.

I take my pile of wips, all the random balls of yarn I have scattered around the house, stray hooks and patterns and tools and safety eyes and all the rest. Then I make a big pile.

Usually I have three or four things started that for whatever reason I just can’t stand anymore. Maybe the fabric isn’t laying right, or maybe the sweater is obviously going to be too big, or maybe I just hate working with the yarn.

So I grab those nasty old projects I don’t want to make anymore and frog them. The trick is: do this step before you chicken out. First thing.

If you don’t love the project the second you pick it up, frog frog frog and wind wind wind. I promise you’ll feel better.

The next step is to untangle your yarn and tool mess, and put all those things away. Lastly, take a look at your patterns and toss the ones you have no intention of making. Chances are good you can toss them all because if you still wanted to make it, you would have finished it.

On Saturday morning, while searching for my crojo, I did exactly this and declared yarn bankruptcy while drinking vats of coffee and binge-watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Those ladies aren’t any sort of New Jersey I’m familiar with, but I love them all the same. Danielle is back, surprise! I’m sure this will work out just fine now that everyone has moved past Teresa trying to pull Danielle’s hair out at a fancy party. I do hope they can sort out the cake throwing business as well.

I didn’t come here to talk about RHONJ (But I could go on for days! Please share your views in the comments!).

I came here to talk about missing crojo and yarn bankruptcy. Focus, focus woman!

I didn’t find my crojo after declaring yarn bankruptcy, so I tried a few other things:

• Scrolling through patterns on Ravelry;
• Scrolling through the 10,000 projects I’ve pinned on Pinterest, finding none suitable and therefore pinning 5,000 additional projects I’ll never make;
• Browsing Etsy;
• Reading my favorite crochet and knitting blogs;
• Dusting off my craft magazines and pattern books and flipping through those;
• A long hot bath;
• Looking at what everyone is making in the Facebook crochet groups.

Nope. Still no crojo.

Not this time.

I’m just really stuck.

But I’m not panicking, it’s alllll good.

Even though I have a really ambitious plan for the rest of 2017, I’m not going to panic about this brief inability to pick up my hooks. Because after all the things I tried to fix my lack of crojo, I realized I was doing all the wrong things.

A lack of crojo happens when your brain gets overloaded with information and ideas. So the things I tried were actually making it worse. I was cramming even more ideas into an already overloaded brain.

I decided to take a HUGE step back and not even try to crochet for a week. I usually take my crochet to work so I can hook away at lunchtime.  When lunch rolled around and I just didn’t feel like it, I’d get all grouchy with myself and start sweating deadlines.

Giving myself permission to take some time off helped my mindset a whole heckuvalot.

Instead of feeling crappy about not crocheting, I brought my laptop with me to work. At lunchtime, I found a nice sunny spot in the park and decided to write. It’s actually been pretty enjoyable watching the leaves fall and seeing families out exercising together and listening to the park maintenance crew grind tree stumps right next to my car. A nice man even stopped by to give me a religious pamphlet and invited me to his church.

This park is very busy.

And maybe the stump grinding was a little annoying but still. It beat sitting at my desk feeling pissed off about not wanting to crochet.

So here we are.

I have no crojo nor any idea when it might return.

There is no pattern in this post.

I’m not looking at patterns or projects so I can’t share any with you today.

How about a photo of my Halloween costume instead:

Tell me, what do you do when your crojo goes missing? And how do you feel about the Real Housewives of any state, not just New Jersey?

XOXO,