Welcome to Week 3 of Not a Christmas Mystery crochet-a-long. I hope you had lots of fun in previous two weeks. Blanket coaster gave some of you hard moments, but you did just great! And again, this CAL is not about making decorations, but also about learning something new. So… tapestry crochet has added to your crochet skills! This week is about overlay crochet. I should say I was eagerly waiting for Friday to share next project with you. I finished it just two days ago (stuffed all motifs and arranged them into a garland). Let me introduce – a Snowflake Garland! My garland consists of 10 stuffed motifs (I made 20 snowflakes), but you can of course make it shorter, or longer. Or even use snowflake motifs as single decorations. Today we will learn how to do overlay crochet. I should say this is not a classical overlay pattern, as we will not cut yarn after every round and weave in ends. For the needs of this CAL I modified instructions a little to make them easy to follow. And, as always, lots of progress pictures are waiting for you. If you follow my work for a while now, you might know that overlay crochet mandalas is something I started my designing life seven years ago. And I keep creating them as making mandalas give me needed sense of peace and safety. And I love watching them growing in my hands. As I continue working in overlay crochet for many years, I add some small tips and tricks to every new project trying to make patterns easier and more straightforward. For one snowflake motif you will need yarn in 4 colors. Main color will use almost entire 10g ball of Catona, and you will need small leftovers in rest three colors (about 2-3g each). For assembling a garland, I used glass beads in different colors – just what I had at hand. The beads are optional, and you can add small pompoms or even tiny and simple crochet baubles. Or simply put only snowflakes on a string and add nothing else. Wondering where to find the pattern? It’s a part of my Not a Christmas CAL hosted on Ravelry right now. Purchase CAL listing HERE on Ravelry and HERE on Etsy with the first three parts, and the last pattern will be automatically added to your Ravelry library after it will be released next Friday. And if you are looking for the same yarn I used, Scheepjes Catona cutie packs as well as individual skeins (in 10g, 25g and 50g) are available in your local Scheepjes shops and via online retailers: Wool Warehouse* and Black Sheep Wools* (both in UK, international shipping) Caro's Atelier* (NL, Europe) Taemombo (US and Canada) See you next week! Subscribe to a newsletter not to miss a single post. You can also follow me on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.