This doesn’t happen to me often, but when I saw the Lotus Flower Blanket pattern on Hooked by Robin, I knew I had to make it. Eventually. I first saw it not long before we moved, which didn’t seem like the right time to start something so intricate — and the yarn it calls for, Scheepjes Whirl, is expensive enough to fall into the “splurge” category for me (especially when you add the shipping to Canada as there are very few retailers here who carry it). But thanks to a goodbye note with an amazon gift-card tucked inside I decided to go for it, and my Whirl was waiting in the mailbox of our new place when we picked up the keys.As it turns out, the pattern is actually a lot easier than it initially appeared, especially after getting through the first ten “set-up” rounds. It wasn’t long before I memorized it and could crochet while listening to a podcast or watching TV, just checking in once in a while to make sure I was counting the increases correctly. I didn’t get all the way through the pattern — I must crochet a bit loose compared to the pattern writer — and so stopped at row 46 instead of going to 50. From there I just did a row of single crochet all the way around to give it a bit of a finished edge. And it’s a good thing I did, because I would have absolutely run out of yarn otherwise!The yarn was Scheepjes Whirl in the colourway Sherbet Rainbow, and I worked it all up using a G/6/4.25mm hook. I can’t get over the beautiful gradient of this yarn: it’s one continuous piece, a whole thousand metres (about 1100 yards), and the colour changes one tiny strand at a time.I will definitely make this pattern again; it’s a lot of fun, deceptively simple, and I’d love to see how it works up in different colourways — or even the same one, but working the yarn in the opposite direction, so that it would be blue in the middle and pink on the edge. But not for a while. After making 800+ shells/petals I am ready to work on something more… straightforward. Ba-dum tscha.