As we prepared and then waited for Hurricane Matthew to come ashore, I was reminded of another summer and another project that seemed to defy me.

On July 13, 2010, I began work on what was eventually to become the first (and so far only) Mamy bag I have ever made.

Composed of 48 hexagons, I elected to use the African flower hexagon motif that formed the basis of the crochet soccer ball I had made the previous month.

I naively thought I would have the bag finished by August 1, the start date of my state fair season.

But when August 1 rolled around just 18 days later, the bag was no where near to done, and I had to set it aside and begin work on my 2010 North Carolina State Fair project:

By mid-October I was once again ready to work on the Mamy bag, and I once again thought I had just a week or two of work to do and the bag would be done, but as it happened, the Mamy bag was not ready to be finished.

All in all, the Mamy bag took me seven-and-a-half months and 13 blog posts to complete:

One of the hardest and most valuable lessons I learned from the Mamy bag is that some projects can only be done on their own time, and there is little to nothing you can do to hurry them along.

It seems that this particular narrative afghan project is one of those projects.

As the weekend approached with Hurricane Matthew working his way up the coast I had made sure that we had enough easy to prepare food on hand:

a that I had a battery powered lantern with fresh batteries in case the power went out:

I worked on my project most of Friday and Saturday, only taking breaks as necessary to walk the dog and eat.

As last night slipped into this morning, I surveyed the center panel:

While it was lovely, it wasn’t yet enough to fill the space I had set aside for it:

My dog and my cat had nothing to say on the matter. They were just glad it had stopped raining:

So I gathered together the other crochet items I am entering in this year’s fair:

And while I did that I ruminated on my crochet predicament. I could hurriedly do something different for the center, put it together, and call it done — probably with minutes to spare — or I could listen to what the project was telling me — that this center panel is the heart of the piece, and while it will be wonderful when it is done it will not come easily.

So I decided to be patient both with myself and this piece, and when the sun rises on Monday, I will get my completed pieces turned into the state fair, an I will continue my efforts to finish this project, one stitch at a time.