The road to this year’s North Carolina State Fair project is one of the bumpier crochet roads I have traversed, and I was grateful when today, I was able to debark from the struggle bus I have been on.

As I’m not really sure what all of the elements will be or should encompass, I have to take time from my crochet to search online databases for mentions of my grandmother, and then try to figure out what can be rendered in crochet that will elucidate for me in some measure who my grandmother was and what that has to do with me.

The latest challenge has been crocheting the six long-stemmed tumblers that wended their way from my great-great grandmother Eliza Catharina Appel’s marriage to Friederich Louis Hill in April 1859 across the continent and 156 years to me.

The challenge of representing a clear glass item in crochet is not insubstantial, and the first hurdle I faced was “what color best represents a substance you can see through?”

I settled on Red Heart Super Saver light gray, and after much crocheting, frogging, and recrocheting yesterday afternoon I came up with this:

Happy that I finally had something that I could not only live with, but which I liked, I hurried and got to work on a second one while all of the peculiar joinings and pieces were fresh in my mind:

Realizing that even with the second crochet tumbler completed my stack of index cards with odd notations might not be enough to allow me to duplicate the crochet tumbler as accurately as I would like, I got started on both the third and the fourth long-stemmed tumblers-to-be:

Here are all of the pieces (so far) in a group photo:

Like any journey (crochet or otherwise), it can be a lot easier to plan if you know where you’re going, but sometimes (in both life and crochet), you need to move forward even if you don’t know your exact destination.