One of the things impeding my progress on my 2017 North Carolina State Fair project has been the fact that the pieces of the center panel have been under a pile of other more recent crochet projects, protected from complete chaos by two carefully placed beach towels — the table top was rendered invisible.

Yesterday, after running up and down the stairs what felt like a thousand times or so, I finally hit table top:

Having successfully unearthed the pieces that most need my attention, I went back up the stairs in search of my go-to needlecraft book. It doesn’t specialize, instead it covers (in general terms) everything: knitting, crochet, embroidery, cross stitch, sewing, quilting. It is the book I turn to when I have no idea what questions I should ask, and to my relief, I found it in under five minutes, which — if you could see the entropy into which my crochet empire has devolved — you would realize is (relatively speaking) practically the speed of light.

So with the pieces unearthed, and the encyclopedic needlecraft handbook at my side:

I was once again able to resume work on the pieces themselves.

Most of the pieces I have left are placing dependent. In other words, I can’t begin embroidering on them until I know where they are going to be placed and in which direction they will be oriented, so the two pieces I had that were symmetrical jumped out at me.

One was this bow shape that I crocheted from burgundy yarn:

And the other was this multicolor fan that I had crocheted from a variety of yarns:

Completely out of last years’ “embroidery on crochet” groove I had found in the count down to the state fair, I was unsure how to proceed with the pieces.

This is where the needlecraft book came in handy. After looking over the embroidery pages, I decided to begin modestly with a couched stitch in which I made small stitches over a strand of yarn that had been laid across the top of the crochet crazy quilt piece:

and while it didn’t, to my eye, looked tricked out enough, I left any further tricking out of the edges for later when the piece is joined.

Having made progress on one piece, I used that mojo to begin work on the fan, and while I didn’t get very far, I did make forward progress, and fell in love (once again) with the scroll stitch:

There is still a lot of work to be done, but tomorrow, when the sun rises on the new day, there will still be eleven crochet days left to August, and my hope is that I can put all of them to good use.