Sometime shortly after 5:00 pm, just before I needed to walk the dog in order to get my son to his “count off” in time for the pre-band clubs meeting performance, I crocheted the last stitch of the last cookie for this year’s North Carolina State Fair project, and while it is an important milestone along the way, I am still not remotely closed to finished.

Yesterday, I had worked to crochet this large, frosted sugar cookie:

along with these six “in process” dark chocolate caramel to-be crochet cookies:

and these six snickerdoodles:

Here they all are in a cookie group photo:

Today, I focused my efforts on completing the three large Lemonades inspired cookies, the decorative surface of which had bedeviled me for the last couple of weeks. Desperation and desire to finish them led me to this solution:

From there, I finished crocheting the small sugar cookies with sprinkles:

And then moved onto the last ten M&M cookies I would need for my project, and while there were moments it seemed I would never reach my goal, eventually, somewhere in this array of ten cookies, I crocheted the last cookie:

As is clear from the cookies in the above photographs, I still have a lot of ends to weave in and stitches to be marked; this is just as true of the cookies I didn’t have time to photograph.

So tomorrow, when the sun rises on Raleigh, I will have my bent-tipped yarn needle in hand, and I will begin work on the next leg of this crochet journey.