This past Friday, after all of the hubbub and busy-ness of the past week, I spent a leisurely evening at my nearby LYS, Yarn Tree Studio, working on my latest front burner project: Dotghan .25 and I also got some news about the NC State Fair

While I made modest but measurable progress on the preemie-sized, it turned out that one of my crochet compatriots that evening had already been to the state fair.

I asked her how Cookieghan 2.0 had done.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked. Her question made me even more curious.

“Yes,” I assured her, “I really want to know.”

Cookieghan 2.0 had gotten second place in its category, and I was thrilled.

I knew that this year’s piece was going to be a real stretch for the judges of Department Y who would be evaluating my piece. The project has almost no drape, there are gaps in the fabric, and cookies themselves are not flat, but have a hint of dimension so that they look like cookies, and I topped it all off with a not widely used joining method.

In another surprise to me, Dotghan 1.0 took first in it’s category of crochet baby blankets of two or more colors.

Knowing that Dotghan 1.0 was able to sway the judges of Department Y gives me some confidence that the idea of the Dotghan series is one whose time has come, and I spent the rest of the weekend working to finish the preemie-size blanket I call Dotghan .25

Here is the progress I had made as of this morning:

I worked on it feverishly throughout the rest of the day, appliqueing the dots as quickly and efficiently as I could. I even took the project with me to Carolina Ballet’s production “A Balanchine Celebration featuring Rubies,” and it turned out that the afternoon was time well-spent all the way around.

I got to enjoy the production, and I finished Dotghan .25 with enough time to get this photo in the waning daylight:

Now that I have finished one of the myriad unfinished objects in my crochet empire, I will need to choose another from my list of long overdue crochet projects and work to finish them, one stitch at a time.