To the outside observer, it may not seem that living the crochet life takes much planning or thought. You have your yarn, you have a hook, and you have your imagination. You make one stitch, you make another and then then before you know it, you have a completed project. At least you do if you don’t have anything else going on in your life, but the vast majority of crocheters are like me — they live lives complicated by the fact of being human, and at times they find that instead of just one thing to work on, they have competing crochet interests, and this is where I find myself.

In an ideal world, I would concentrate fully on my state fair project.

But I don’t live in a Platonic ideal world, I live in an untidy version of an ideal world, with pets and family and an upcoming trip. My state fair project is well beyond being portable, so instead of taking it with me where I can’t work on it, I have been preparing some rehabbed crochet squares for travel.

I am working the remnants until all that is left for the ends to be woven in so that when I travel I will just needed my bent-tipped yarn needles, and the project will get tidier as I go rather than expanding to fill all available space.

So imagine my delight when in addition to the twelve crochet squares I have already prepared for the trip, I found twelve more:

In not too much time at all, I had those “twelve more” remnants transformed into travel ready crochet squares:

But as I worked on rehabbing the remnants, my 2018 North Carolina State Fair crochet project beckoned. I really want to get the project finished, but it is not a collection of straight lines and similarly sized pieces that can be put together in the middle of the night under cover of darkness. No, the crochet crazy quilt panel requires daylight and lots of patience. It requires time to do one thing, find out it doesn’t work, and then do something else.

So today, after I had added twelve more crochet squares to my “crochet to work on while traveling,” I got out the center panel of my now 2018 North Carolina State Fair crochet project.

First, I wove in the ends whose fates were certain and then I trimmed them:

Having done this, I inspected the front for what to do next:

with particular attention to the large off-white pieces. As I completed my inspection I was brought back to last year’s “night before the missed deadline” and the the question I had then: should I border the large off-white pieces of the panel or not?

As I am not in a hurry and this point, I decided to see how a longer stretch of crochet rickrack would look along that edge, so I split a long strand of four ply worsted weight yarn into two equally long strands of two ply yarn. Using a 3.5 mm hook, and modifying the directions I found for crochet rickrack, I got to work, and in short order, I had a medium length of crochet rickrack. When I placed it along the edge in question, my inner Goldilocks though it looked “just right”

and while I’m not sold on the color I used, I am sold on crocheting two long pieces of rickrack to border both of the larger off-white pieces pieces, and now that I know that, I will decide what color to use and split some yarn in advance of my train trip so I can continue moving forward on both projects, one stitch at a time.