This time last week, I showed you the progress on the blanket. I had 29 squares made. Now I have 36. And I am DONE with making squares. I wove in the ends on the last one yesterday and this morning, in the quiet and coolness of the very early morning, I laid a sheet on my deck and played with my squares.

The first rule was to make sure that the edges didn’t touch another of the same colour. The second was to try to keep matching petals away from each other. And the third was a less important attempt to keep matching backgrounds away from each other. AND of course to have the colours and values distributed as best as possible.

I took a few photos from all angles and finally came up with this. I’m sure it’s not perfect but then the finished blanket is unlikely to be viewed like this when in use.

It’s crocheted with Red Heart With Love and a 6mm hook. I’m using a hook from my Denise2Go kit, which is a small kit of interchangeable hooks with different length cables. It has been very comfortable to use.

I have been enjoying posting photos of each square to Instagram as I go. If you want to take a look, I’m Nicolaknits_crochets on Instagram. Or you can peek at my Ravelry project page which is here.  Uploading photos to my project page has been quicker than ever since I realised I could link my Instagram account to Ravelry. As soon as I open the “photos” tab, I am instantly shown my Instagram photo, I can click on it, and it uploads. Then I caption it and that’s it. Before I was always hunting through my huge photo file on my laptop, looking for the right picture. (Now that I’ve deleted a lot of older photos, that shouldn’t take so long now. Plus I am finally getting savvy – when I save the photo, I give it an actual searchable name.)

We’ve had a cooler than usual June, with more rain than I expected, and a good thunderstorm the other day. It’s very pleasant, actually. Considering that some places in Europe have been having a heatwave, with France getting to 46 degrees Celsius, and Kuwait reached a high of 52.2, I am grateful. We have experienced 40 degrees here in our little corner of Canada, but I just can’t imagine 52.

Work is good, with things ramping up for inventory in a week. Next weekend we’ll be counting all the notions, in other words the packages of everything that we sell at the fabric store, whether it’s needles, pins, thread, whatever. Then after that, all the fabric bolts will be laid down and stacked carefully according to their density code in time for weighing day. It’s a huge undertaking but with all the preparation that’s done ahead of the big day it normally goes pretty smoothly. The main battle is keeping it organised, when customers like to rummage and move stuff and put things down where they don’t belong, AND the store is open for most of the time that we are counting/weighing. We start at 7 and the store opens at 10. So there are inventory teams and a customer service team.

I just remembered that I have a photo of my new table display. We now have a beaver welcoming people as they walk into the store! Made from a faux fur throw, I had a bit of fun with that yesterday. He only has to stay together for the Canada Day weekend, eh!

The “logs” are storage boxes. I really like them but they are a bit pricey for me otherwise I’d totally turn my craft room into a virtual pine forest!