Yesterday, I did what I had been avoiding for the past two weeks and took an inventory of all of the pieces I have made (thus far) for my 2014 North Carolina State Fair project.

My avoidance had centered on two things:

One, it would take a lot of time to lay out the pieces — time that could be spent actually crocheting (or piecing together, or weaving in ends)

Two, I might be unpleasantly surprised at how much was still left to be done

Despite my reservations, I decided to move forward with the inventory and began by moving all of the furniture in my living room out of the way and vacuuming up as much of the cat and dog hair as I possibly could.

Once that was done, I laid out the center panel:

From there I moved onto what I think of as the east and west panels of the project which went a bit more quickly as I had most of the pieces of the east panel joined into strips:

Next up was the south or “front porch” panel. This went slowly as almost none of the pieces had been joined:

Then I laid out the two completed corner panels:

Lastly, I laid out what bits I had done of two remaining corner panels and the north panel:

The whole process took me a little more than three hours, but at the end of it, I was heartened to learn that I have fewer than 250 squares to crochet to finish all the pieces needed for the panels.

I could also see that I am going to have to come up with something to both differentiate one panel from another while creating some kind of visual coherence for the piece as a whole, and while I am more than a little bit nervous that I am not sure I have an answer as to what I will do, maybe — just maybe – my dog Clooney will share his insights with me:

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