When I took notice of the date today, I was surprised to see that August has sped right on by and all that remained of my favorite summer month is eight days. It didn’t even really feel like August — the humidity was low, it wasn’t too hot — we were experiencing  an unseasonably pleasant day.

This prelude to fall also reminded me that when the sun rises tomorrow, there will be just forty-six full days left for me to work on my now 2018 North Carolina State Fair crochet project which, given the history of this piece, doesn’t seem all that far away, so as soon as I had my morning errands run and my dog walked, I took advantage of the weather and laid out the center panel that has bedeviled me for so many years, and while I was tempted to make more pieces which I could then fit together, I decided that the wiser course of action would be to focus on one small section, and I went back to this not fully adorned crochet fan motif:

Visually, the section was a mess, but showed much promise.

I didn’t really know where to begin, but I decided that seaming the claret and light fuchsia pieces would be a good place to start, and they were, but it has been awhile since I seamed two pieces like that, and I managed to do it badly twice. Then, either through luck or practice, I finally has a visually acceptable result and I was able to move onto the next thing.

But even in this one small patch of the center panel, there were a lot of next thing options, so I added some length to the rickrack I had been crocheting, then wove in the ends and tacked it down. It looked pretty good, but again, it need a little something more.

The “little something more” ended up being French knots worked in fairly purple length of grape fizz. Then I added some jade cross stitches on the top of either side of the fan.

Still not satisfied, I found a length of the perfect green and added more straight stitches and French knots, but I ran out of time before I could finish everything I wanted to do, so I took this photo:

rolled up the panel and put it where it would be safe, and then got this photo of the nine crochet circles I had worked on so I would have a traveling project:

and then I began my end of day travels.

I am still feeling confident that this is the year I will get this project finished, and I intend to persist, one stitch at a time