Of late, my quest to declutter has taken up most of my time.

I have sorted through boxes and bins, untangled long strands of yarn and long forgotten pieces of crochet, repacked the bins and boxes as needed, and lost in this flurry of decluttering activity was my crochet.

Obviously the crochet itself was still there, but I had little time to do anything with it, and now that the official start of the crochet season is nearing (August 1, in my household), I have decided that I need to finish up the pieces I am currently working on transforming from remnants to squares so that I can concentrate all my crochet efforts on my state fair piece.

I started by cleaning out my purse and working on the “in medias res” squares I found there. It took me longer than I had expected, but before sunset, I had these six crochet remnants completely transformed into six five-inch crochet squares:

With that done I decided to work on two five-inch squares each composed of four lightly textured crochet squares that had been liberated from the “yarn slug” I recently disassembled, and I almost (but not quite) got them done:

Then, wanting to assess how much work was left to be done on what began life as my 2015 North Carolina State Fair crochet project, I got out the bin that houses all of the pieces and laid out my personal crochet nemesis, the center panel:

To my surprise, there wasn’t that much left to be done.

Up until March, when we moved, the pieces for this project had been secured in a bin in my crochet office taunting me. Then when we moved, I placed the offending bin in storage, and with the passage of time, the gaps to be filled grew large in my imagination, but as I looked at the pieces in the light of a midsummer afternoon, I could see that I can (and will) finish this project before the 2018 deadline.

In the meantime, however, I have no doubt that I will add something to make it a bit more complicated, I will agonize over what to put in and what to leave out, but I also know that this year, I will at long last finish this project as I continue to work one stitch at a time.