Square Deal

Later today I'm teaching the next installment of C-BAM (crochet block a month). This month's square is "Mandala" from Chris Simon. (Used with permission.) Since I need to have samples in the store at least two months in advance of the class, I finished June's block today. This is "Cat Tracks" from The Crochet Dude. (Used with permission.) My photos don't even begin to do justice to Drew's lovely pattern. The square above is the store sample; it's made from two balls of "127 Print" in colors #40 and 41. The block below is for Addy's "grandma's house" blanket. It's made from Bernat Cotton Tots. The pattern is fun and fairly easy. I say "fairly" because I ripped the first one out more times than I want to admit. But the fault was mine. If you COUNT each row, it's a breeze. Don't count? Plan on a trip to the frog pond.

May is Anastasia's month to teach a block and she's doing something similar to Water Lily from Jan Eaton's book "200 Crochet Blocks". This is my version for Addy's blankie; I added a few rows to increase the size to 12" to match the other blocks.

The book lists this one as "challenging". I found it more fiddly than challenging. And I would have been a lot happier if I'd known about the pattern errors when I started. Row 7 just wasn't making sense, so I started looking for pattern corrections. And of course, the first error was all the way back in row 3 - so more ripping occurred. But the square looked a lot better after that.

I have seven signed up for tomorrow's class. Once that's done, it's VACATION time! We fly out of Burbank on Sunday to visit Miss Addy - oh, and we'll probably see her parents too. But grand babies are what's important, right?