Today I spent most of the day laboring over the piece I want to enter in the state fair next week. While I worked on it all day, when I finally set it aside for the evening, it seemed to me that I had made very little progress.

I am at a critical stage in the project. I must get the next five rounds done in short order, or I will not have the project ready to turn in. So the first thing I did after getting up and starting a fresh pot of coffee was to set to work on my project.

The first decision I had to make was where to work.

I had three options.

The first was to work in the upstairs loft where the light is not good, but where the cat does not spend much time. This means that the area is somewhat free of cat hair. The poor lighting, however, means that it takes me much longer to figure out which color to put where; it also means there is a substantial likelihood that I will end up having to undo work to replace a poorly placed color.

The second option was to work downstairs where the light is very good. The problem is that the cat thinks she owns the downstairs and everything in it, so not only is there a lot of cat hair, when I spread the project out in what she believe is her territory, she feels an overwhelming need to come shed on my work.

The third option was to work in my “outdoor office.” The light is excellent, and it is relatively free of cat hair. While normally that would be enough, the temperatures have taken quite a dip in the last couple of days, and to take advantage of the light and the lack of cat hair, I would need to bundle up in order to be able to sit and work when the temperature was not going to go over 65ºF; after a moment of hesitation, I bundled up and moved my stuff outside:

Since tomorrow’s weather report reads, “an isolated sprinkle or light shower can’t be ruled out,” I spent most of my time today organizing squares and rectangles so that I could piece them together tomorrow from the safety of the loft.

As such, the tasks I worked on today did not give the appearance of much progress. Here are two future rows of Bauhaus squares:

It can’t be seen in the above photo, but each pile is ready to be joined, and I took notes that I can consult to make sure I have them in the correct order; additionally, I did finish joining the blocks of this row, one side to the other:

After that was done, I began work on two of the additional 27 Bauhaus quilt block iv motifs needed to finish the project, getting this far with the first one:

and this far with a second:

I am hoping that by Tuesday afternoon, the work I did today will begin to come together in a visible and substantive way and that the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was right when he asserted “What is essential is invisible to the eye”: