I want to start by saying thank you to all of the people who have left me comments and notes of encouragement about my decision to make my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project my 2016 North Carolina State Fair project, and now that the sting of not finishing has begun to recede, I have decided that like a rider thrown from her horse, the best course of action is to get back in the saddle.

This year there is no “morning after” the state fair project for me, no “ta-done” moment. Instead, I found myself wondering “what now?”

Dust has been accumulating, laundry — both clean and dirty — has been piling up, and my pantry is overstocked with an odd assortment of foods that I have purchased over the past eleven weeks and which appealed to me when I was in the store, but in which I immediately lost interest once I had them stuffed into my cupboards.

But the most pressing decision facing me was whether I should put the piece away for a bit or continue forward.

After giving it some thought, I decided to continue forward.

I have, at this moment, a lot of accumulated knowledge about what was to have been my 2015 state fair entry. I know how many chains form a corner, I have a certain sense of color that permeates my thinking, I know which size hook to use for which color yarn, and I realized that if I set this project aside for more than a couple of days, all of that information will begin to fade, and as it fades, I will be less inclined to work on the project, more of the information will retreat to the recesses of my brain, and then (if I were to set it aside) when I finally took it up again, I would probably have to reverse engineer many elements which now make perfect sense to me.

So I started by joining what remains of the 176 one-round granny squares that form the panel for the clock.

At first, it felt odd working on the project I had thought would be in the rear view mirror of my life, but after joining just two squares, I was very glad that I had not tried to rush the project.

One of the granny squares I was trying to add to the panel had just two stitches where there should have been three, and while I am willing to incorporate a granny square with one too many stitches, I do not like the rather anemic look of a granny square with one too few stitches, and I as I was not in a hurry, I felt no distress over coming across a piece that didn’t quite fit, and I did not find myself mentally calculating how many seconds correcting the imperfect square would cost me.

With one stitch here and another stitch there, I made progress and had nearly joined 9 of the 11 rows needed for the panel.

Here is how the panel-to-be looks without the clock:

and here is how it looks with the clock:

I still have more design decisions to make for this panel, and I am very glad that I now have the time to make them, and while I am a little weary from this particular crochet journey, it seems that the right thing to do is to get back in the saddle.