During the last few weeks I worked on this year’s state fair project, I became remarkably good at looking past the dust and detritus that was accumulating around me.

Now that state fair season has officially ended, I am not longer able to turn as blind an eye to the entropy, and before I started my crochet day, I felt obligated to make forward progress on housework and take advantage of the day’s spectacular weather and get some laundry done.

By early afternoon, I had assuaged my sense of obligation and set myself up in my outdoor office to both work and enjoy the crisp (but not cold), sunny autumn day.

The first thing I worked on was square E-3 for the granny sampler fat bag that has recently gotten hold of me:

Similar in many ways to it’s immediate neighbor, square E-2, there were a couple of times I was tempted to frog the whole thing and start from scratch, but I decided that this time, I needed to move forward no matter what my doubts, because with a project like this, what is important isn’t how a square looks on its own, but how it looks in relation to the squares around it:

With what I think of as “the bottom row” completed, I moved to the far left square of “the middle row” which is also known as E-6. This time, I had a clear idea of what colors I wanted to use and in what order, so the crocheting went fairly quickly, and I had it done well before sunset. Here is how it appears on it’s own:

and here it is how it looks with its neighboring squares:

I tend to see things in photos that I don’t notice in life, and in this photo I saw that square D-2 (bottom left with the last round worked in pumpkin) should probably have the last round of 3dc shells frogged and then reworked with a half-double stitch instead so that it better fits with the other squares.

Tomorrow promises more of the same weather we had today, and I am hoping that I can look past the dust motes and yarn scraps and spend more of it in my outdoor office working on what I think will be (when it is done) a very fun fat bag.