I could not have asked for nicer weather today, and just as it can sometimes seem that forces larger than myself are conspiring to stop a project from being completed (I am thinking of the bag that refuses-to-be-completed), other times it can seem that these same forces converge to get things done, and today was that sort of day, not the least of which included weaving in 109 more ends.

Invariably as I near the end of a large project, I come to learn things that, had I known them when I started, would have made the project go much more quickly. The rub, however is this: the only way for me to learn is to start the project without the knowledge that I know I will gain.

Such is the case with my 2010 North Carolina State Fair project, an effort I have come to call simply “the behemoth.” What I learned today is that the quickest way for me to complete a row is to have already made 1 to 3 squares of each kind of square that I am including in the project.

Here are the squares I used in assembling row 26 sunning themselves on the railing of the deck and just generally looking festive:

Another view of the squares with their ends fluttering in the wind:

For whatever reason, once I had row 26 laid out, the rest of the work went very quickly today. There was no hesitation, no time consuming errors; I just joined one square to the next, pulled out my reference sheet to confirm their placement, attached row 26 to row 25 & wove in the ends, checked the reference sheet one last time, and then trimmed this ends. This is what I had when I was done:

Then, to get a sense of how it would look when finished, I laid out rows 1 through 21 right above rows 22 through 26:

Then, one last picture to show the detail:

After the sun had set, I made some more squares.

Now I am ready to get up and do it all over again.