In an attempt to keep my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project on track this weekend, I made myself an impossibly long to-do list on Friday and kept it in close proximity so that I could check to see what needed to be done next.

First on the list was “finish crocheting the white keys for the piano keyboard.”

When I posted my blog Thursday night, I had finished 13 of the 52 keys needed for the keyboard piece of this project, so I had a way to go. Complicating things was the fact that the piece is fairly narrow (approximately 2.75″), so my tension needed to be very consistent.

I am not sure exactly how many rows I had to frog and re-crochet, but it doesn’t really matter, because that part of the keyboard is now done:

With the keyboard in the ta-done for now pile, I looked at the next thing on the list which was to decorate at least one of the four circles based on embroidery my grandmother had done on a tablecloth for a card table, and that is where things ground to a bit of a halt.

Here is one quarter of the tablecloth in question:

and here it is with one of the circles that I originally crocheted:

It fitted almost perfectly over the original design, and therein lay the problem: my decorative elements on top of the crochet canvas could not possibly be as delicate as my grandmother’s stitches were on the woven cloth.

With that undeniable truth in front of me, I got out my hook and my yarn and began the work of enlarging the circles, and this is how far I had gotten shortly before it was time for dinner:

The one element of designing my state fair pieces that I can never plan for is how long it will take me to stumble on a solution to the problems that will inevitably arise, but I will continue to move forward as I always do: one stitch at a time.