Lily Pond CAL - Part 1.1

Have you seen it going around in the past few weeks? Have you fallen in love with it too?

The Stylecraft Lily Pond Blanket Crochet-ALong! I love Stylecraft, I love blankets... How could I miss out on it? So, I decide to play along and share my enthusiasm and progress with you in special dedicated blogpost, every Sunday!

The CAL will appear in installments that come out every other week, so each part will have two blog posts from me! Hence the 1.1 above ;)

We started this Tuesday, but because I didn't make up my mind about actually participating until last week (I am kinda busy, you might guess from the lack of regular blog posts). So, I was forced to improvise, as this CAL has taken flight, big time and Stylecraft is pretty much sold out everywhere. Not just the original yarns, but also suggested substitutes.

While I do wish/intend to make a blanket in the original alternative, Special DK, some day, I settled for an old familiar yarn friend:

This yarn was my go-to-acrylic when I first started taking crochet seriously! It is lovely, although it doesn't cut it to the smoothness of Stylecraft. But when I saw it on the shelves of my LYS in all it colorful shelve-full glory, my mind was settled. I am participating, and these are my colors!

I made myself a fancy color card, for which I normally don't bother (my memory is more then fine), but I am so absorbed by this project that I did this anyway ;)

And, despite a lack of time, I got a good start also!

I have to make four blocks over a period of two weeks, so I am not in a rush to keep up.
My first thoughts on this project: it is pretty simple, but then, the pattern was written to be and I absolutely don't mind! What I do mind is that my working pattern looks like this:

I don't mind color changes, but this project has learned me that I do, very much, mind hook changes!
Right now, I don't see the point, although I do play along, and it does give some extra trouble. I missed the first hook change, hence the markers (appropriately colored like my hooks) and the colors markings on the pattern. It is easy to overlook. I hope I will find the benefits!

Lastly I want to show you a close up:

Can you guess front from back? I will give it away: lower fold is front, upper fold is back. Do you agree with me liking the effect of the Lily (color) better on the back? It might just be my stitching, but I don't like how the front let's my stitches shine through... I was considering changing it around (quite a bit of extra trouble), but then: you probably didn't notice on the first picture, I posted higher up. So, I just roll...

I am not a very pattern-dedicated crocheter. Although I don't like working without a pattern, I do pretty much wing it. As I often 'enhance' the pattern to my liking as I go, I am determined not to do so this time... So I let it be, for now. I can always attach the blocks backward in the end :P

Have fun stitching!

Note for my Dutch blog readers: I won't be translating these posts into Dutch, but just copy-paste them in English from my English blog, unless I get more then one specific request to do so.
This because I am quite busy, and I do my own translations (you might not have consciously realized, but I don't just throw in Google Translate ;) ).