Klaar! Mezzaluna No 2

The second Mezzaluna is done!

This is kind of like Attic 24's Neat Ripple pattern...you so desperately want to do it, then swear continuously while frogging hooking frogging hooking, counting counting all the way, wondering why why WHY??

Then the light shines through and angels start singing and you know THIS is another pattern that you will hook and hook for the next 60 years. 

Here's my blue Mezzaluna:

Soft as a cloud

The border...I started with the first two tows of Border #38 in Edie Eckman's Around the Corner - Crochet Borders (get it!), and added another thingamajig thingey to rather make a picot, can't remember how, but here it is:

Picot in-between two 2DCtog clusters?  Maybe.

Oh, and every third row I used TR instead of DC, to add some length.

Halfway through I already knew that was also not going to be mine, lovely as it is, much as I love the colour and the softness...just wanted to try it on then:

The lenght is right :-)
(Yes, sitting at Pure Café...that green in the window is a dead giveaway)

It was going to be my aunty's.  

This blue is HER colour, and she has cold winters where she lives, and she needs a soft hug like this AND she's going to visit my sis in Ireland next year when it will still be cool!!  

So when she came for a quick visit yesterday...

... we tried it on

She loved it!

Happiness!

Will the next mezzaluna be mine?

Maybe third time lucky :-)

PS. I managed to find a second-hand copy of the pattern book online, yeay!
Waiting with bated breath for the journey from Japan to South Africa

Crochet a rhino

Heidi Bears (she of the brilliant African Flower Tutorial fame) has come up with a beautiful rhino design, in African Flowers.

Image: http://heidibearscreative.blogspot.com

Find the pattern on Ravely and help in the fight to keep our rhinos safe - $1 of each and every sale goes toward the Kariega Foundation.

You might not know that the plight of rhinos in South Africa is bleak, to say the least.  They are slaughtered on an almost daily basis for their horns; 688 up to 22 September this year.  

The horns are dried and ground  and used as "aphrodisiac" or "medicinal reasons", particularly in Vietnam.  Our government has been in talk with the Vietnamese government about this, but in the meantime poaching and butchering continues.

This one month-old calf was found screaming next to the body of her mother, after she was hacked to death for her horn. Easter weekend 2012, Alma, Limpopo.
Image: www.beeld.com

Poachers are brutal, they are armed with AK 47's  and highly organised.  They don't care who and what they kill in the process, have no respect for game reserves, with the majority of those poached in Kruger National Park. 

Rhinos are magnificent, beautiful giants.  They don't deserve this, and will be extinct sooner than we think, if poaching should continue.