With the kick-off of what for me is the State Fair season right around the corner, I am trying to sort out the details of my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project.

The idea for this year’s project presented itself in early spring while I was at my son’s trumpet lesson in what I think of as the trumpet-mom corner.

Situated next to a wall of bookcases which houses a dedicated crafting section, the trumpet-mom corner has become a crafting oasis of sorts for me.

I can’t take phone calls, any housework that might need doing is not mine to do, and it was in this corner of repose that I found my inspiration for this year’s state fair project.

I have long been interested in the life of the Amish.

While they are known in some circles as Plain People, their quilts are decidedly not, so when I saw the title: How to Make an Amish Quilt: More Than 80 Beautiful Patterns from the Quilting Heartland of America, within easy reach of my perch in the trumpet-mom corner, I had to take a look.

Many of the traditional Amish quilts featured in the book would lend themselves to a crochet interpretation, but one in particular caught my eye, and it is that quilt I wanted to attempt to recreate in crochet for the 2012 North Carolina State Fair.

Composed of two squares, one very simple, and one more complicated, I had the details of the simpler square worked out very quickly.

The details of the more complicated square were, however, more complicated.

Over the last 12 weeks, I have, at various times, tried to figure out how I would recreate that more complicated square in my chosen stitch pattern, and I until today, all of my attempts had been (to put it politely) less than satisfactory, but today, I finally got past the seemingly innumerable hurdles that had previously presented themselves.

The first step in breaking through this crafting log jam was when I devised a workable, but not entirely elegant solution. That not entirely elegant solution led me to this:

which, in turn, led me to this:

I was particularly pleased to get this rectangle figured out because weeks earlier I had spent an entire afternoon working on a series of attempts that were dismal failures. Today, however the solution came to me in one moment, and after four tries (I kept miscounting), I had a rectangle that when combined with these two squares:

fit the center motif perfectly:

I still have a bit of motif design and housecleaning yet to do before next Wednesday when the state fair season officially opens at my house, but it’s looking as though I just might be ready.