After taking a complete inventory and arranging the squares I have crocheted so far, I was able to see where I needed to focus my efforts, and as much as I would like to set aside the square making and begin the process of joining in earnest, I know that I need to persist in working out the details of the design first.

Experience has taught me that as I work on a project, my ideas will change, and if I start joining the pieces too early in the process, I risk having to spend time unjoining them — time that does not exist between now and the state fair deadline.

To that end, today I worked at rendering this little paper tree into crochet:

I had been toying with various arrangements of what will be a clothesline and a fig tree. Sometimes it was against a backdrop of six rows of sky and three rows of grass, and other times it was against a backdrop of five rows of sky and four rows of grass.

Sometimes the clothesline trended up, sometimes it trended down — each time, however, I was not able to get a clear enough sense of what I wanted to depict, so today, I finished crocheting most of the squares I would need for the fig tree, and I borrowed grass and sky squares from a plastic bag that houses all of the pieces of my center panel.

Using all of the squares available to me, I was finally able to come up with a scheme that pleases me — sort of:

I have no doubt that once I start taking needle to yarn and begin joining the squares, I might make some changes here and there, but even if this is not exactly how I end up rendering the clothesline and the fig tree, it is close enough that I can move forward as I always do: one stitch at a time.