Finally I finished my Stardust Melodies CAL (makes a happy dance)! After I successfully finished all squares and joined them together it was “only” border time. I choose the paid border pattern as this looks much fancier and fits more the blanket in my head. The border pattern looked simple enough – the beginning was quite forgiving working with either even and odd numbers of stitches and afterwards it was just a repeat of two different rows. But you probably did hear all the swearing and cursing last week.
I was always proud of being a “mathematical girl” – I loved maths at school, I did special courses, studied banking and finance and am working in the IT of a bank. But as it seems basic mathematics such as counting to three eludes me completely. Three – yes, three! – times I had to frog one round because I made a mistake in counting. This, of course, I realized only when I was working the next round. My hubby ducked and hid – he already knows that he needs to be really quiet when that happens and let me cope with it myself. I ground my teeth, frogged and restarted – cursed, frogged, restarted – swore, frogged, restarted and prayed.
But once this round was finished successfully the rest was easy! So I proudly present the final and totally complete Stardust Melodies! Winter can come now 🙂
Currently I am only working on one project I really like to finish soon: my Stardust Melodies blanket. At least I am not the only participant of the CAL that struggled to keep up and failed. I would so love to have more time to crochet during the week but mostly I find time on weekends. Now I have only four squares left to join to my blanket – three of them are already on the blocking board and the fourth is waiting to be done. But after eight squares in two days my hand starts to hurt, so I need to make a short break before making a run for the border.
This week I have been busy with catching up on my Stardust Melodies CAL. Actually the border patterns have been released already and I had not even finished all 24 squares once. Until  now I didn’t even know how big my blankets gonna be. It’s the first time that I actually did not have a plan layed out in detail right from the start but kind of went along with what came. Now that I have three rows already joined, I am able to get a feeling on how big it already is and how big it might be by adding my chosen border. 
It’s not easy for me to have the picture of the finished blanket in my head but still needing to create the second half of the squares. Luckily there are a lot of nice movies on Amazon Prime and Netflix and the weather is usually not that good on weekends. It always seems to me that there is a unknown law of nature that the weather is nice and sunny during the week when I have to work and is rainy and cold when I am off….
Last week I still did not have much time for crocheting as there was another cake waiting for me to be made. This time it was for the mother of my best friend. This woman is a really great person and kind of “adopted” my husband and me. So there was no way I would say no when I was asked to create a cake for her 80th birthday. Sadly she has diabetes so I had to ensure that the cake did not contain too much sugar. I picked yellow sponge cake with blueberry filling and a whipped cream-mascarpone cream. Her favourite color is yellow so I added some yellow roses and blue hydrangea made of Cake Dutchess modelling paste. I love how thin this paste can be rolled out and still be workable for some time.
I love how easy the petals could be dusted with petal dust and how well it holds the color after steaming. I have used this cake as an excuse to buy the cake steamer I had an eye on for quite some time. It was on sale at that moment so my restrain to buy it was easily resolved 🙂 It’s so much easier to work with a professional steamer rather than the water boiler I had used before (and almost burned my fingers with). Now I have all my equipment ready to practice more flowers as roses are fairly easy as soon as you have figured them out. The hydrangea don’t look that right though – maybe it would have been better to make them in white and dust them later just as I did with the roses.
Now that the cake season is over again for some time, I will again have time for some CAL work. I will give you an short update on my Stardust Melodies CAL. Here you see the next six squares ready to be joined to the rest. I am still behind six squares but I am sure that I am able to catch up. I am not sure yet if I am going to add more squares or if I just use it as a lap blanket. I think it will become pretty heavy the more squares are added as it is made of cotton yarn. I am not sure if I want to give it away every time for washing as I don’t know if washing saloons have enough knowledge still so that they don’t mess it up. I would be devastated if it got ruined after having invested so much time…
So actually I was wandering back and forth and looking at my yarn stash, trying to figure out what to do with all that spare time. And even though I didn’t want to start another big project I could not resist for long. I started my own 
Then I decided to do something about all those squares already on my blocking board. I can still remember how hard it was to join all those squares on my Nuts, so I didn’t want to wait until the end with the Stardust Melodies. I was undecided which join to use – I was torn between the celtic  lace join and the flat braid join. I tried the celtic lace first but it was way to dominant for the squares. I wanted something that helps bring out the texture of the squares not distract from them. The flat braid join works perfect for that – I totally love how it adds a filigrane feeling to the rather solid squares.
Did you know that there actually exists a youtube playlist for the Stardust Melodies CAL? Each square is designed around a peace of music and it’s really fun to listen to it while crocheting along.
The third square is called 
The CAL continued with a square called 
Last week was actually the last week for my hygge – and I am really a little bit sentimental about it. It’s been a long journey with quite some ups and downs and it was a really hard work blocking it in the end too. It softened up after wet-blocking so actually using it as a wrap might be an option. I have not found a fabric yet that spoke hygge or Danish mermaid to me. So I did not line it yet and at the moment it is just hanging around a little bit waiting for the right usage.
As it seems now I have a lot of spare time and as I promised last week there’s a new CAL I am participating in. It’s 
I started of cause as soon as I had my yarn with the square called Begin the Beguine. It looks complicated but actually is really simple as soon as you have figured it out. It’s a little bit smaller than I expected – it will block to 20 cm – but this just means that I might have to make more of the squares. At the moment I am planning on doing 2 of each for a 6×8 sized blanket. I have not done the second one as I am not sure about the layout  of the blanket. I’ll make one of each square and then check out which fit together best. They are actually really nice and easy to fit in every evening – maybe because the are single color – so no weaving in of a million threads like the Nuts about Squares CAl. In case you want to try to create one too, make sure to check out Polly’s great video tutorial on Youtube. It is really very helpful in case you are not the pattern reading type of crocheter or if you want to clarify where to put a specific stitch.