One of the perils of working on a project in fits and starts, as I have with what will be my 2018 North Carolina State Fair entry — but which began it’s life as my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project — is that you can forget innovations you made and lose skills you developed over as you worked on various elements and find yourself having to reinvent the crochet wheel you invented the previous year.

This is what happened to me on more than one occasion with this piece, particularly as it applies to the crochet crazy quilt panel at the very center.

For that reason, this year, I am determined to stay focused on the project at hand. I have not registered to enter any of the other categories in the state fair premium book, I am not driving around the county looking for the “perfect” pink for a one-round granny square or the exact right gray for a thimble. I am staying put and using what I have at hand. If what I have at hand is somehow insufficient, I have to come up with a new plan.

I decided that if the crazy quilt panel of this project is ever going to get finished, the panel should reflect not only the iconography of my grandmother’s time, but the constraints as well, and one of the constraints my grandmother would have faced would have been that she did not have an inexhaustible supply of materials to work with. She would have been limited by what was available, and I have decided that the thing with which I need to be more frugal is my time.

And the truth is this: I have enough yarn to crochet for many years to come, and I no doubt have something in my yarn arsenal that would be perfect.

Knowing that time is at a premium, I decided to focus on finishing the cherry cola crochet rickrack. After splitting a v-e-r-y long strand of four-ply cherry cola into two two-ply strands:

I got to work:

I crocheted until I finished one of the two-ply strands, and then I began crocheting with the second. Eventually, I finished the first cherry cola rickrack “frame:”

Next, I worked on crocheting a crochet crazy quilt triangle to fill in a gap along the edge that would abut the recently completed (or so I thought) green-ish piece:

After checking the fit, I saw that the problem lay not in the orange-ish triangle, but in the greenish piece. So I added two more rows of single crochet to that and voila:

I had filled in a gap.

However, as can be seen in the photo where I tried to crochet yellow flowers on the piece just below the two newly crocheted pieces, my crochet on embroidery skills have accumulated quite a bit of rust, so I got out a collection of pieces I had made in 2016 to try out this crochet crazy quilt idea, a pile of already split yarn ready to embroider with, and my go to embroidery book:

My plan now is to brush up my embroidery skills so that I can more easily move forward, one stitch at at time.