A few weeks back, I was at one of my favorite Facebook pages: Lianka Azulay’s “Bonita Patterns.”

Through her business, Bonita Patterns, Ms. Azulay has popularized the crochet “crocodile stitch” with a number of interesting and inventive patterns that include the usual suspects: booties, hats, and shawls, as well as some lesser known suspects: hooded capes, leg warmers, and fingerless gloves.

I don’t recall why I had popped into look at the Bonita Patterns Facebook page, but there was a give-away going on, and I entered.

Lucky me, as I won this amazing Furls crochet hook which arrived in the mail this past Saturday:

For the unfamiliar (which I was) Furls is located in Texas, which is, among other things, a hotbed of crochet activity, and with hooks like these, I can see why.

Something the photograph of my new hook does not show is just exactly how comfortable the hook feels in the hand. I do not always like the way a hook over 9mm fits in my hand, but my new 15.75 mm Q hook was not only smooth, but perfectly weighted; I was sorely tempted to break out my sari-ribbon strips from Hippie Chix Fiber and give my new hook a whirl, but I decided that what little time I had to crochet today would best be used by working on my 2012 North Carolina State Fair project.

I had these ten remaining center squares that needed to be made into full-fledged multi-color motifs:

Using most of the rectangles and a couple of the squares I had worked on yesterday, I made this much progress on the ten remaining motifs-to-be:

I have my refrigerator and pantry stocked so that I don’t have to run any errands and can spend the next two days working on finishing these motifs, and maybe, just maybe, I will get a start on assembling my state fair project.

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