Today was one of those days when despite the fact I was very busy, I got almost nothing done, but despite my failed efforts to move forward, I didn’t stop trying because three, as we’ve been told, is a charm — sort of.

The first thing I worked on (after breakfast, coffee, and dog walking) was planning for my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project.

I design my own projects in a design-as-you-go sort of way, altering them as required by real life limitations or the realization that a design that seemed perfect through the rose-colored lens of my mind’s eye is not so perfect in reality.

Despite this decidedly seat-of-the-pants approach, I begin my ruminations well before I begin my work, and today seemed as good a day as any to begin working out the details of my 2012 state fair vision.

With graph paper, calculator, and pen at hand, I made some sketches of what I envision and the pieces I will need to make to achieve that vision. Then I took hook to yarn and began the laborious process of making various pieces that might work, or, as I often discover, might not:

While my progress on the 2012 state fair project was limited (to put it politely), it was a necessary step forward, and just one of many that I will have to make to get from here to the completed project in early October.

So with nothing decided for this year’s state fair piece except a couple of things won’t work, I turned my attention to the Granny Square Sampler afghan I am working on and studied the layout of the squares outside the center panel determined that Square I-2 was the most likely first square I would need to make.

Using the directions I had written and posted at my blog the last time I made this project, I encountered an error on the second round. Using my finished project as a guide, I frogged my way back to the end of the first round, and redid the second and third rounds (the third round is where the error became clear), and the corrected the directions in the previous blog post. I then continued on my way, and twice made errors so egregious there was no working around them or smoothing them over, so I had to frog and rework twice more before I got to this point:

From there, my crochet went fairly smoothly, but by the time I had reached the joining round, it was time to pack up and take my son to his trumpet lesson:

I suppose it would be nice if every day were perfectly productive, but I don’t know, because it could be that these days of struggle (however minor the struggle) bring something to the finished work that would otherwise be lacking, and so I (with Agent P at my side, or at least looking out the window of my youngest son’s room for any evil geniuses who might be lurking about in an effort to thwart my state fair ambitions):

will continue with the work at hand — undiscouraged