Gifts

We had a mini-dishcloth swap in our meetup group last fall. Here is the awsome cloth that my swap partner Jennifer made for me. I love the tumbling blocks design, and it is so soft. The photo doesn't do it justice.

My grandma gave me lots of her stash of yarn from her plastic needlepoint canvas projects. I will use a good portion of it for squares for the Wildfire Blanket project. She also got a lot of crochet thread from a friend, so now I have lots of beautiful thread complementing the other threads in my stash. I better start working on more tiny projects. Just waiting for it to arrive. There was too much yarn & thread to bring back on the plane with us. So when it gets here, it will almost be like Christmas all over.

I have also received the new Interweave Crochet magazine for winter. I'm looking forward to making some of the items in there. I also got Lily Chin's Couture Crochet Workshop, and am excited to attempt some of the patterns in there, as well as use her ideas to adapt patterns to fit myself. One of her ideas about turning chains at the end of the row, is similar to something that I came up with on my own when I worked on my dischcloth. I use one less chain than recommended for a typical turning chain/1st stitch of row, and then make the correct stitch in the first stitch of the row. She says to just make an elongated chain st, to bring it up to height, and then do the correct first stitch in the row. This eliminates the gap and frustration of trying to work into a chain on the next row. Of course this will mean a trip to the yarn store.....