Once upon a time, there was a crocher designer (hint: it's me) who read lots and lots of blogs and wanted to be one of "those people" who lead an interesting and exciting life and was making money doing crafty stuff.  Namely: she wanted to be successful doing something she loved. And every month (when she could afford it) she would buy Mollie Makes magazine and gaze longingly through the pages at all of the crafters who had "made it" to be in said magazine. She hoped that one day that would be her.

Fast forward a bit, add in a book and a a dollop of dreams coming true.  Life was beyond great. However, there was one thing that would be the icing on the cake.

And then the emails started coming through, and there was a phone interview (and the first errata was found) and she waited. She stalked her post man for weeks waiting for this to hit the doormat.

Yesterday, there was a lot of jumping, a fair bit of bad dancing* and some loud and out of tune singing because this month's Mollie Makes features the book, contains a pattern and even has a wee interview with me**.

The design is the Black Eyed Susan chunky baby blanket. It was a design that took AGES to plan out, having never made a doily before, (there was a lot of graph paper involved to get it just right) but is very very quick to make. I think the sample took me a couple of hours at most.

The model is the utterly gorgeous Nia, daughter of the also gorgeous Natalie from Bambino Goodies.

Mollie Makes is available today in most supermarkets and newsagents. It is also available to download and is usually available in the US shortly after publication here.

Crochet at Play is available here.

*no, that is not me.  Rather from the brilliant Dance Like Nobody's Watching series. Thanks to Kate for pointing them out!

** Fact: the endless number of puns on my surname is half the reason I kept it.