Time for week 9 of Last Dance on the Beach CAL and the square for this week is designed by my good friend and favorite designer Dedri Uys from Look at what I made.

Dedri has made a cross patterned square and the first thing that came to my mind is the Southern Cross. This star formation has helped explorer and nautical adventurers find North when out on the open sea. The Southern Cross was the first stellar constellation that I was able to recognize in the African sky because of its very distinct shape and 5 bright stars. Due to the strong connection with seamen of the past the Southern Cross just has to be part of our Dance on the Beach afghan.

Resources

Colors used

I wanted to make the crosses prominent in my squares so I decided to alternate them with two colors in my Merino Soft Dancing in the Sea kit. My Color Crafter Dancing in the Sea squares are all mono-colored. So I decided to do the rest of my squares all in one color. I was too lazy to frog the one square so just left it.

An extra note on hook sizes this week. I went down one hook size relative to my gauge swatch this week. This means I used a 4.0mm hook for my Merino Soft squares and a 3.5mm for my Color Crafter squares.

These are the colors that I used from my Merino Soft Dancing in the Sea kit and arranged according to the photograph above from left to right.

square	color 1	color 2
1	615 – Soutine	–
2	615 – Soutine	625 – Kandinsky
3	630 – Lautrec	614 – Magritte
4	625 – Kandinsky	610 – Turner

Video tutorials

All videos for Last Dance on the Beach are available through my YouTube channel.I have a video available in English and Dutch. Please note that I use UK crochet terms in the English video. If you are more familiar with US terms, this conversion chart will help you with the most common terms.

For those of you that are left handed I have the video for week 9 available in English and Dutch. Again, please note that the English videos use UK crochet terminology.

Yarn kits

If you still want to join the CAL, there are kits available in two yarns and in three color ways. You can choose a base kit with Color Crafter yarn or a luxury kit with Merino Soft yarn. The three color ways are Dance in the Sea, Dance in the Rain and Dancing under the stars. Both kits have yarn and a special edition label to add to your afghan. If you choose for the luxury kit you will also get lots of other goodies. And maybe the best part of this project is that 2 euro of each kit sold goes to a charity aimed at helping people with mental health difficulties. Kits are available from Wool Warehouse (UK/International), or your local Scheepjes stockist.

Participating in the CAL

To join the CAL, please join the International (English speaking) or Dutch (Nederlands) Facebook groups. You can post all your photo’s of your squares here and there are lots of people to help you if you get stuck somewhere. The patterns will be posted each week in the Facebook groups and on the Scheepjes website.