I had hoped to start my crochet day by working on the as-yet-unmade multi-color motifs that I need for my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project, but instead I started by taking an inventory of the pieces I have made so far which led me on a somewhat different journey than I had originally envisioned.

Most of the pieces for this project have accumulated on the breakfast/crochet bar in my kitchen, so that is where I began my sorting and stacking of the pieces for this project.

It was slow going at first.

I have been leaving long tails on some of the completed pieces to make the joining easier and reduce the number of ends to be woven in; despite my various strategies to eliminate any tangles resulting from these long tails, I have only been able to reduce, not eliminate, them.

However, once I had extricated the pieces from one another, to my surprise and delight, I found that I had completed not only the four smaller triangles I will need for each corner of the project, but all of the twenty-two larger triangles, and twenty-nine of the thirty single-color squares as well.

After sorting through the single-color squares I had already made, I decided that I wanted to make one more dark brown square, but when I looked into my Red Heart Super Saver (RHSS) stash in search of a sufficient quantity of RHSS coffee for a single-color, textured square, I came up empty-handed.

How, I wondered, could this have happened?

I was torn. Except for the skeins of the new RHSS color, blue suede, I am committed to not buying any new yarn for this project. So in order to keep my commitment to myself and celebrate the aesthetic of the Amish quilt it is based on, I ventured into the yarn annex in search of a brown acrylic yarn.

The first two skeins of dark brown yarn that I found were wool, but after a few more minutes of determined effort, I found this:

— the perfect vintage acrylic dark brown yarn. With my 5.5 mm crochet hook, I got to work and before the day was over, I had crocheted this square:

and woven in the renegade ends on these twenty-two large, single-color triangles:

Now that all of the single-color pieces are done, the only thing left is to make use of whatever sunshine comes my way and work on the twenty-nine multi-color motifs I need to make before I can begin joining them all together.