Twelve days into the 2018 crochet season, I am doing my best to keep myself on track. After three years of failing to finish this project, I am in no mood to let it get away from me again, so instead of letting myself  I remind myself, there is a joy of persistence 

Today, I almost managed to derail myself, but I quickly remembered that no matter how small a step I made toward finishing, I at least had to make a step.

One of the first steps I made was to finish decorating this small patch of the crochet crazy quilt center panel:

I had tried using a Sorbello stitch to spruce it up, but it didn’t work out as I had hoped. Today, using simpler stitches that were more familiar to me, I finally managed to trick it out to my satisfaction:

My success here, led me to other areas of the center panel that needed some attention, but which will only become more difficult to adorn if I first fill in everything, so with that in mind, I made a line of gold zigzag chain stitches:

which somehow led me to a small, unadorned blue crochet piece in the upper right-hand corner of the panel.

I began with idea that I would embroider a flower, but somehow, that turned into a dragonfly, and then I finished up with some French knots worked in grape fizz and some simple straight stitches to join them in a zigzag line, almost like a dot-to-dot.

Pleased that I was making progress even if the progress wasn’t all that impressive, I took a moment and joined a short seam of two new crochet pieces I had made:

but decided not to join them to the panel because I still have so many small details to complete in the interior, and anything I can do (or not do) that makes the detail work easier is a good thing.

I then decided that now was as good a time as any to finish the cherry cola crochet rickrack that will frame the two largest pieces. After frogging several inches, I reworked the stretch I had taken out, and soon, it was done:

Pleased that I had managed to move forward, I documented my recent progress:

My progress is modest. There is still much to be done and probably not as many days as I would like to do it, but for now I will revel in the joy of persistence, moving forward one stitch at a time.

Related posts: My 2017 North Carolina State Fair project in medias res