The other day when I took a few minutes to report someone selling my free crochet soccer ball pattern, I was grateful that I had been alerted to it and annoyed that I had to report it at all. There is still a lot of tricking out to be done for my now 2018 North Carolina State Fair project, and while the tricking out continues, I was miffed that someone had stolen not just my design, but my time.

The soccer ball was designed to celebrate the 2010 World Cup. I chose the African flower hexagon as the central motif because it was the first time the World Cup was being held on the continent of Africa, and I wanted to note that milestone in some way, however small.

I decided that the pattern should be free because I wanted anyone who had a hook some yarn and the determination to make to be able to exactly that. From what I have seen, the crochet soccer ball has been made on every continent with the possible exception of Antartica (and possibly not). To my delight, multiple soccer balls were crocheted in Australia for Somali refugee children as they worked to regain their lives in a new country.

So the decision to make the pattern freely available was deliberate, and I am glad to report that with the assistance of two crafters I’ve never met and Etsy’s legal department, the offending store has been closed.

And while the Etsy legal team was busy doing their work, I kept busy doing mine. This is the fourth year I have worked on this piece for the North Carolina State Fair, and I really want it to be the last, so with that in mind I continued working on the upper right hand corner of the center panel. Here is where I was with it as of Sunday night:

and here I was when I had to set it aside for today:

I had managed to decorate most of the seams, and I even finally got the hollyhock inspired crochet crazy quilt piece seamed to the center panel, then I stood up and got this overview:

I know that one day when I stand up to take the photo of the center panel, it will be done. All of the seams will be decorate with all of the ends woven in and trimmed and all that will be left to do is figure out how to fit the panel into the center of the afghan but until then, I will move forward, one stitch at a time.