It has been, to say the least, a very hectic week, and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to get back in the saddle with the work to be done on my state fair project.

Tuesday I found myself crocheting in the Denver airport while waiting for a flight, and yesterday, just five days later, I was outside the Raleigh Convention Center surveying the unveiling of the finished piece of which my recent efforts were a part:

When I had been working on the individual pieces I crocheted, I had been transfixed by just how large the crochet pieces were and wondered how they would all fit together. While I had seen photos and video of Olek’s other installations, I was not able to fully understand how these large crochet tiles would all fit together.

I knew that some of the particulars about how to crochet the piece probably figured into how the pieces would be put together, but until the assembly began, I didn’t really know how. I also wondered how pieces that weren’t an exact fit would be dealt with.

As a pretty much “solo” crocheter, I don’t have to manage the vagaries of other people’s gauges. If I don’t like the way something fits, I frog it and redo it, but I knew that there would be little time for that kind of detail, so I wanted to see how the artist worked around the differences that would inevitably arise.

This past Thursday and Friday I got to see first hand how those situations are navigated, and suffice it to say, there is a strategy for everything, and as Olek and her assistant, Tina, have done this a number of times, there really isn’t anything they haven’t seen when it comes to crochet.

So with the Olek piece now in my crochet review mirror, this is what I found on the road ahead of me when I finally awoke from my post installation exhaustion stupor:

In the hurry of the past week, my crochet table once again looked like a mini-tornado had barreled through.

The things I needed were not in place, and the things that were there, outside of the template, were not the things I needed, so I set a timer for ten minute sprints during which time I would do a specific task, like “put away clothes and shoes that ended up in my crochet office,” or “wind smaller lengths of yarn I will not be using into a ball,” and “take all recently would balls of yarn I won’t be using upstairs.”

I don’t know how many ten minute alarms I had to set, but eventually, the table was cleared, and the Now 2018 State Fair piece was in place:

Obviously, I have a way to go before I am done, but I an ready to proceed resume my own crochet journey the only way I can: one stitch at a time.