Remembering Claudine
Last week I was planning on having the 3rd part of my doll's bed pattern up on my blog (the sheet set). However, earlier in the week I lost a dear friend of mine to cancer. She battled hard despite being diagnosed when it was already too late for cancer drugs to save her life, although the drugs she was given prolonged her life so that she could spend more time with her family.
My friend was trained as an early childhood teacher and instead of flowers at her funeral, she wanted books. Her favourite children's book was "My cat likes to hide in boxes" written by Eve Sutton and illustrated by Lynley Dodd and that book was read out at her funeral by her youngest child's teacher. While I haven't created anything inspired by that particular book, I recently designed an afghan square inspired by another New Zealand children's book about a cat called "The Dog and The Mog" written by Kaye Arnott and illustrated by Laura Wenden-Green. My "Ngeru" square was inspired by the cat in the story ("Ngeru is the Maori word for "cat"). This week is when we would normally be holding "Daffodil day" in Aotearoa to raise money for the Cancer Society of New Zealand. For this week (26th August 2020-2nd September 2020), I would like to offer my Ngeru square pattern free for download. In return I would ask that those who download the pattern make a donation to a local cancer society or hospice. From next week, my pattern will be back at full price with 50% of the sale price being donated to organisations that support people with cancer.
You can see my "Ngeru" design below and you can find the pattern here. You can read more about the inspiration to my square here.
Footnote
When my friend was first diagnosed 3 years ago, I was taking part in a unique crochet along project. The idea was not that a part of the pattern would be released each week for us all to work on as happens in a typical crochet along. Instead, one person started and designed the centre and wrote up her pattern. She posted it to the next person on the list who then contributed a few more rounds, typed up her pattern in a shared document, posted the blanket to the next person and so on. At the end, the final blanket was sent back to the original person who would then donate the blanket to our given charity. We were meant to get our pattern tested and then run as a CAL. However, it has taken longer than intended to get everything ready to go. My friend's cancer diagnosis came shortly before my turn with the blanket CAL which was named "aroha" (the Maori word for "love") so I decided to make my friend a blanket up to the end of my part of the blanket and then to extend it with some rounds that were created specifically for her. Sadly, I didn't get many good photos of her blanket before I sent it to her as I wanted her to get as much use out of it as she could. I am also not 100% happy with all the designs that I created for her (all representing some of the parts of Aotearoa where she had lived), however, I have some ideas for a blanket pattern that have been floating around in my head for the last 3 years and I am hoping that at some stage I can get them out of my head and created into a blanket that would be a more fitting tribute to her. My little contributions to her blanket are shown in the photos below.
