The devil, it is said, is in the details, and my 2015 North Carolina State Fair project is riddled with details, so the past couple of days — after taking a very sobering inventory of what was actually done — I decided that I really needed to start nailing down some of the details, and that while it is fun and interesting to start one new piece of the puzzle after another, I really needed to get a much better idea of how I would put together all of the pieces I was making.

So, that is what I did. Some of my ideas worked well, like my attempt to “square off” one of the long-stemmed tumblers so that it would be easier to incorporated into the finished project:

others did not, and because the time to finish the project — like the late summer days — is growing shorter, I did not bother to document my failures, but when their numbers began to mount and there were no easy successes in sight, I got out my Clover bent-tipped yarn needle and wove in the ends on the crochet piano keyboard:

The last few weeks of any project like this are always a bit of a challenge, and this time it is exacerbated by the fact that I really have no clear sense of how this is going to come together, but I will move forward as I always do, one stitch at a time.