Ellen Bloom is one of the rock stars of crochet. I love her style, her obsession with Noro, granny squares, and her love for LA which is all documented beautifully and with humor on her blog, LA is my Beat.
Ellen designed these little stars and told me about them when I mentioned I was doing this Crochet-Along. I begged her to post the pattern on her blog so we could all make some, and she agreed. Thanks, Ellen!
Tonight, our little town is having it’s big Tree Lighting, the opening of the two-day Christmas Bazaar, and of course a small parade with a visit from Santa. On top of that, Selma’s got The Christmas Carol (She was awesome last night!) and I’m going to a “progressive dinner,” where the appetizers are at one house, the main course another, and the desserts a third. Because this is Cordova, it’s pot luck, too. I’m on the dessert list, and I spent way too much time today making a cake. Chocolate Pecan Bourbon Cake. (yum!) It’s currently still in the bundt pan because I’m always anxious about getting cakes out of bundt pans without breaking them, so I’m putting it off until absolutely necessary. I also spent too much time today worrying about whether I needed actual Bourbon in the cake (which we did not have) or whether I could use scotch, of which we have probably too much. In the end, I decided to get some bourbon, but I think next time I will try the cake with scotch instead to see if I can detect a difference. (All in the interest of scientific and culinary discovery, of course).
A NOTE ABOUT THE POINSETTIAS: In the pattern, it says “do not fasten off” after making the first petal. This did not work for me, (maybe I was just misinterpreting the instructions)I found I would have had a string of petals, not exactly what I was looking for. So I fastened of and just slip stitched each petal to the preceding one. This makes for more ends to weave in, but the end result looks like the picture. What about you?