Discovering the kinship mandala

Kinship Mandala designed by Oombawka Design

As the world seems to turn up on its end and many of us find ourselves sitting at home developing new routines, I turned to my crochet social media sources for joy and inspiration. I am a newer user of Instagram and somewhat haphazardly found my account filling up mostly with geocaching and crochet photos. (My new iPhone with an amazing camera has a lot to do with this!!) With this came many new people to follow, and so I came to learn about the Kinship Mandala. Designed by Oombawka Design and hosted by Dedri from Look At What I Made, this delightful mandala pattern was released over 6 days on Instagram and gave me something cheerful and whimsical to look forward to during my first days of travel quarantine. It can’t be said enough how important social connections are right now, and feeling connected to my global crochet community is invaluable!

So, here are some photos of my progress and the finished round product. Today, Dedri has posted the instructions to turn this into a square… decisions decisions!

• 

Kayakate’s version of the Kinship Mandala

• Scheepjes Stonewashed XL in five colours
• 5mm hook

Grinda Shawl Adventure

Just in time for Mum’s birthday I completed the Grinda MAL shawl created by LillaBjörn Crochet and described here.  This was my first attempt at a shawl of this kind, and my first use of the Scheepjes Whirl yarn.  I’ll admit I ordered three whirls without any concrete plans of what to do with them – simply because I fell in love with the look of them and the many projects I was seeing come up in the many FB groups I’ve joined.

As always, I took many photos of my work in progress, with a view to showing them to my Mum after the surprise was revealed.  It came down to the wire to finish in time, and my husband came out with me on a Saturday morning to give my Grinda a photo shoot in the woods.  I edited the photos together to make this “making of” video for Mum which became part of the reveal on birthday day 🙂   I hope you enjoy watching as much as I (we) enjoyed making it!

 

First Days…. Such Beauty

We have arrived…. to the blistering heat that is blanketing this part of the world!  It is making everything and everyone move a little more slowly.. including me getting to the blog posts!  On Sunday we made our way from Zurich to Magadino by car.  I wasn’t  expecting Switzerland to be full of tunnels, but of course this makes sense – especially when we had to drive Up and Down the Gotthard Pass because one of the tunnels was