In my examination of all the photos of crazy quilts that I have found online, I have noticed that most crazy quilts (or at least most crazy quilts that have a life on the internet) have a lot of surface embellishment. This can take the form of certain embroidery motifs in the center of the crazy quilt piece or — more often — it takes the form of intricate and substantial embroidery along the seams where the pieces have been joined, and the stitching is not serviceable, it is an over the top decoration, meant to draw attention to seemingly everything.

So with many anonymous internet crazy quilts as my guide, I looked at this patch of my crochet crazy quilt:

and could see immediately that even though it looked pretty good, it still needed something more.

First I tried a simple stitch in a pink yarn:

Sensing that this was not the something more that was needed, I pulled the stitches out and tried using a sea coral in a stitch that better reflected the stitches on the other side of the seam. Pleased with how that had turned out. I continued on my way with a zigzag chain stitch worked in two plies of Red Heart Super Saver rouge:

With that “bare patch” remedied, I scanned the center panel for an area that needed more work and found this:

The crochet fan motif was the nexus of an area that needed a lot more embellishment to take it from serviceable to over the top. After trying out several colors of crochet rickrack, I decided on one made of CraftSmart Value fuchsia, and while I didn’t get as far as I had hoped I would, I got far enough to see that this is the direction I wanted to go:

As I look into the future of what remains of August, I can see that it will include a lot of stitches, some of them embroidered, some of them crocheted, but either way, I will have to work them, one stitch at a time.