After a travel and errand-filled weekend, it felt good to get back to something approximating normal, and to that end, I pulled out all of the pieces of the crochet crazy quilt center panel of my now 2018 North Carolina State Fair project. I was unable to quickly locate the crochet rickrack I had been working on, so I laid out what I had:

and surveyed the crochet landscape looking for just the right gap to be filled. My grandmother had gone to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and I have this artifact from that excursion:

Over the weekend while we were driving, I had been giving thought to what I would crochet next, and I very much wanted to include a crochet crazy quilt piece that honored this particular memento, and somewhere between where we started and where we ended, I got an idea for how to do it. The first order of business, however, was to find a place to put it, and after looking over the remaining spaces, I settled on this one:

Using a 5.0 mm hook and Red Heart Super Saver claret, I fashioned this crochet crazy quilt piece:

and after I was done with it, I realized it had a very Missouri-esque flair to the shape which is appropriate in as much as the 1904 World’s Fair had taken place in the “Show Me State.”

Then, using a long-ago discontinued light fuchsia that had been a Red Heart Super Saver color, I worked on a smaller piece to fit in the space just below my claret Missouri-esque crochet piece:

Having made substantive and substantial progress on the center panel, I then turned my efforts to finishing the first crochet square of thirteen for a new crochet purse:

And now as the last six-and-a-half weeks of the crochet season enters the home stretch, I will continue to move forward, one stitch at a time.