After a long train ride and a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles I arrived home on Saturday ready to return to work on my 2018 state fair piece.

While I was tempted to get the quick rush of rehabbing a couple of crochet remnants into five-inch squares, I decided that my focus had to be on the state fair piece, and after closely examining the crochet crazy quilt center panel I discovered that my decision to avert distraction was a good one.

While a quick overview makes it look as though it would be easy to finish:

it doesn’t tell the whole story. While I will conceded that the bits and pieces left to be done are small, there are a lot of them, and the fact that they are small does not make them easy, it makes them intricate.

Take, for example, this small triangle:

The flower could use a stem and a few leaves, but at the very least, the seams of the triangle need to have some embroidery stitches to trick them out a bit more.

To that end, I got out an orange shade of yarn from my bag of “already split and ready to embroider with” yarns and tried my hand at something called a Sorbello stitch:

It is a beautiful stitch, but my execution does not do it justice, nor is it state fair competition quality, so I took it out, and while I was ruminating about whether to try it again in the same color or try it again on some other color or try a different stitch completely, my eye fell on this gap in the center panel:

Obviously it needed filling, and I had just the piece to fill it. Or at least I thought I did:

but once I had it in place I could see that a) it didn’t fit as well as I would have liked, and b) the color was a bit off, so I spent the next 45 minutes working to remake the piece in a different color.

To my consternation the new piece had a more jagged edge than the original I was working from. I tired several things to try to make it as tidy as the original, but none of the things I tried worked.

Then the vaguest of memories came back to me. Like a hazy dream I remembered that I had employed a different kind of decrease technique in order to get those smoother edges, and reaching into my memories from the summer of 2016 when I made many of the pieces, I finally recalled what I had done to get those (relatively speaking) smooth edges, and I not only got a piece with the edges I wanted, but it also fit well:

Tomorrow will be a new day, and with yarn and needle and hook in hand, I will continue my efforts to complete this center panel, one stitch at a time.