With August first set to arrive on Wednesday, I have been anxious to nail down the design of the pieces I will be crocheting for my 2012 North Carolina State Fair afghan.

Based on an Amish quilt, I am trying to both expand and remain faithful to the Amish quilting tradition.

I am expanding the tradition by working a traditional quilt design in crochet and adding an element of depth by using a highly textured stitch pattern; I am remaining faithful to the tradition by limiting myself to yarn that I already own.

This last element is not exactly a hardship as I have what can most charitably be described as “vast stores” of yarn, but it does mean that I can’t go out and buy the new Red Heart Super Saver colors charcoal and (the one that interests me more) blue suede.

Another goal I have is to make as many of the pieces as possible from the partial skeins I have around the house. By not purchasing any new yarn for this project and using as many partial skeins as possible, I will also be on a path to creating order in my rather chaotic yarn holdings.

Bedeviled by yesterday’s not entirely satisfactory efforts to make a suitable triangle (of which I will need 22 larger ones), I turned my attention to the motif I think of as “the plain square.” It was, I thought, a pretty straightforward design, and for once, I wasn’t mistaken.

Using Red Heart Classic medium brown that was nearby and met the requirement of being a partial skein of something I already owned, I made this square:

Happy to have gotten something worked out, I once again turned my attention to the triangle, but used an approach I had only partially explored. At the time I had not been enthralled by the look of the point where the triangle began and the edge created along the hypotenuse.

I tried a different approach than the one I had been using to start the triangle, and the result was much better than my first efforts.

While the triangle is not an absolutely perfect right triangle, it is close enough that when joined to the square (as shown here):

it should straighten right out.

With the problem of how to start the triangle solved, and the measure of the angle close enough to 90º to be able to move forward, the last but if business I needed to attend to was how to deal with the hypotenuse/edge of the triangle.

After an couple of experiments with joining the hypotenuse edge of the triangle to what will be the edge of the border, I arrived at a solution that will be satisfactory.

And while, at this moment, I think that I have solved all of the potential problems of this project, I have really only solved the potential problems I could think of, and I won’t really know how this will come together until it is done.