Last year I celebrated Bastille Day by starting work on the African Flower hexagons that would eventually comprise this bag:

I had thought I would finish it in a couple of weeks, but things did not go as planned, and this project bedeviled me and resisted my ardent efforts. Despite this, six months and fifteen additional blog posts later, the bag was done.

This year I spent most of Bastille Day 2011 on an as-yet-unfinished effort to bring order to my crochet empire. Life and my crochet empire both being like a box of chocolates, I never know what I’ll find.

Such was the case when I came across four swatches I had made several years ago when I took Melody MacDuffee’s Overlay Crochet course under the auspices of the CGOA (Crochet Guild of America).

Here are the swatches in question:

While the course is no longer offered by the CGOA, anyone interested in learning this technique can now get the same course materials I used at scribd.com for just $25. You can either click here, or go to scribd.com and search for “Basic Overlay Crochet” to get yourself to Melody MacDuffee’s well-thought out course materials.

I have found the course to be invaluable in giving me a good grounding in the technique so that I could then follow other overlay crochet patterns. While it is not quite as wonderful as meeting Melody MacDuffee in person, the course materials are excellent and overlay crochet is a wonderful technique for a crocheter to add to her (or his) repertoire of skills.

As for my 2011 Bastille Day project, I sincerely hope it doesn’t take me another six months to complete.