My Special Year

~ Gifts under my Christmas Tree ~

So here we are with the year drawing to a close; a time for reflection, gratitude and anticipation for the New Year ... "full of things that have not yet been" 

 I have had many blessings come my way through the year.  In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined how my Sunshine blog would grow, how I would grow with it, how many lovely friends I would meet, how sweet the feeling of success however small.

Five Beautiful Gifts came my way, leaving hardly any space beneath my virtual Christmas Tree. 

This is my first Gift;   #4 is my Sunshine Mandala

Second up a very special # 1 place !!!!! Emily's Garden ~ A Blanket of Flowers,

a blanket inspired by a blog I love ~ The Patchwork Heart ~

 Third special treat; #3 is my Snowflake Mandala

 a Christmas Mandala ~

Next, two excerpts from FB pages I belong to,  that garnered so many 'likes' I was quite simply ... totally delighted and beyond ~ I took part in a CAL, made up my Christmas Throw in traditional Christmassy colours and ended up with an awesome little blanket!  Hope you will excuse me for feeling just a tad self satisfied with over a thousand likes ... came as such a wonderful surprise!  

Lastly, and the Santa on top of the Christmas cake!! placed second in another link party ~

More than I ever dreamed, expected or imagined possible!
The biggest most heartfelt thank you leaves me and floats out into Blogland to the wonderful ladies who helped place the five gifts under my Christmas Tree ♥

Thank you for reading
Love you all xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pat 

Old Brand New

Baubles .... old brand new!!

Several of my beloved mom's Christmas decorations have lovingly been cosied in the softest cloth for years in my Christmas boxes ... so many fond memories of my sister and I as just little tots watching my mom decorating our tree ♥ love you mom ♥

A lovely post by The Patchwork Heart inspired me to transform these really old baubles and I love how they look!

So easy, and quick too .. and I am so happy now that the baubles that have been in my life for soooo many years, now look right up to date for many years more.

Have a wonderful week ..

Lots of love 

Pat xxxxxxxx

Merry Christmas Throw

♥Wow♥ .... I am delighted with my Merry Christmas Throw. I participated in The Blog Hop CAL with some very talented craftswomen each designing some beautiful squares.   It is so very hot here in Johannesburg during our Festive Season, I knew I wanted to make a statement blanket, not 'cuddle me and keep me warm' blanket, so the idea came to me to make a Christmas theme throw.  Not too big, just enough to make a pop of Christmas colour. And jolly jingle bells!!! this throw does make a huge pop of beautiful, traditional colour in red, white and green!! Makes my very neutral colour, all time favourite chair take centre stage!!!

The throw consists of twelve squares of about 9.5" / 24cm each, and the border is one of my current go-to patterns, the Block St.  To finish off with a merry flourish, I used a Braid edging.

The following pictures show how I have joined the squares. Sometimes, as in the CAL featured here, squares are made up and often will have an different stitch count per square. To overcome this and to join the squares easily and attractively, this is the way I do it:

First I choose the square with the easiest stitch count on which to base the consequent squares.  I chose a traditional Granny square.

*I edged the square with the two rows which constitute the basic two rows of the Block st, i.e. 1sc, 3ch, skip 2/3 sts, 1sc;  all around the square, and then three dc into each 3ch loop.  

*Around the second square, work the first row of the Block st, and as you work along you need to make sure you have the exact same number of 3ch loops as your first square.  If you look carefully at the pictures below, you will see that I have gaps of three stitches and four stitches between the single crochet stitches, worked across the side of the square evenly, so that at the end of the row there are the same number of 3ch loops as the first square.  The corners are 2sc, 2ch 2sc, into the corner spaces in the first of the Block St and 2dc, 2ch 2dc in the second row.  I used the 'join-as-you-go' principle to join the squares. 

*Dedri from Look at what I Made blog, has a very good tutorial on joining squares with different stitch counts, you may like to take a look here as well.

These are a some of the pretty squares ...

Thank you for reading and 

happy hooking!

Pat xxxxxx