This is the last photo of my previous blog post, which made it clear to me I needed to get into a crochet joining groove:

At the time, it represented five days of work, and at the rate I was going, it did not seem to me that I could possibly make my October 14 deadline as I have some non-negotiable non-crochet commitments between now and then in addition to my non-negotiable crochet commitments. It seemed to me I needed to get into a joining groove, soI decided to see what, if anything could be done to streamline my assembly and joining process.

I started by weaving in all of the wayward ends that had accumulated in the process of joining the first nine motifs so that the nine nearly-done motifs were as completed as possible (the visible messy bits of yarn mark where cookies are to be joined):

From there, I planned another row of three motifs and documented them both photographically and in notes. While it was a bit cumbersome, it did reduce the time spent on each motif to under two hours.

Feeling a need to get the time per motif reduced even further, I made a few adjustments and was able to get the time per motif down to under 90 minutes:

If I were able to work in “ideal” conditions, each motif could be completed in about an hour, but like everyone else on the planet, I live in a world that is filled with phone calls, door bells, after school meetings, and a host of unforeseen events which, by their nature, cannot be planned for.

But I know that just as with all of my state fair projects, in the last few hours I work on it, I will come to some revelation of how I could have done it all much more quickly, but unless and until I reach that desperate point, those insights will not reveal themselves to me.