Overlay crochet

Following on from some experimentation with freeforms and spirals, I had started to look into making shells and other freeform shapes.  I didn't get terribly far because I didn't want to waste the fairly expensive cotton I had.  I was also a bit disheartened by the limited colours available to me (both in my stash and in my yarn shop).  The upshot of that was a bit of a delay on progress with the freeforms.

Then, when I was on holidays in Spain, I found vast quantities of relatively cheap cotton crochet yarn in a plethora of bright and fun colours.  So I bought a load of it to be stashed in my luggage coming home.  Yeay!

My First Mandala

While still on hols, I got distracted from the freeform project.  I wanted to make some mandalas using the variety of colours I suddenly had available to me.  And then, what should appear only the whole concept of OVERLAY CROCHET!!! Where have you been all my life???

I discovered that there is a whole world of crochet-alongs (CALs) where people design and share patterns for different squares over a period of weeks and months to build up into huge pieces of crocheted art.  If you'll pardon the pun, I was hooked!

So, I would like to present my first effort at overlay crochet, a mandala based on Block 2 of Tatsiana at Lilla Bjorn Crochet's Circles of the Sun 2015 CAL.  This also nicely showcases several of the lovely shades of new cotton yarn I got.

Of course, I say 'based on', but it's more that I stopped a round or two early, to keep the mandala as a circle rather than turning into a square as part of the overall project.  Also, the bits that may slightly improvised are down to my inexperience with the technique, and not any sort of conscious adaptation on my part!  Thanks to Tatsiana and all the other designers and crocheters that share their designs, ideas, tutorials, skills, etc. and make it so easy for me to figure out what I want to do and then how to do it.

I'm not ditching the freeform project completely, but this technique is where my head is happy at the moment.  I think that I'll get some beautiful necklaces out of these too.