In the musical, The Addams Family, there is a point in the story where Gomez and Fester advise their guest, Mal Beineke, to “focus your fear,” and “troubles all will disappear,” and today I decided I would heed their advice.

I am, as I have mentioned, beginning to feel a nascent panic that accompanies this time of year. Although I begin work on my state fair project with the best of intentions, every year, the time seems to slip away from me, and this past week, it dawned on me that despite my diligence and despite having completed my planning and design work for this project several days before August 1, the time was beginning to slip through my fingers.

When I woke up this morning I had finished just five of the 42 multi-color motifs I need for my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project. These are the most time intensive part of this project, and they are the element I need in the greatest number.

So focused my fear and concentrated all of my crochet efforts today on finishing the three remaining mutli-color motifs of an array of eight motifs that I had been working on, only stopping to crochet pieces as needed for a specific color and only weaving in ends that needed to be woven in to preserve the structural integrity of piece.

Not only did I finish the remaining motifs in the array:

I also finished what had been a partially completed motif that had been relegated to the top of my pianos where I put things to keep them out of reach of my dog, Clooney:

Here is a photo of all the motifs arranged in the traditional format of a nine patch quilt:

This summer has seemed particularly short with the days slipping through my fingers faster than I can count them.

In one cosmic eye blink, summer will be over and the state fair deadline will be here, and in that moment, I want to look back on the waning days of August with no regret, knowing that I did everything I could to bring this project to life.