Les Doudous

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

I've gotten a fun start to the year so far, crochet-wise:

My friend Jean just got back from a trip to Austria and brought me back a beautiful crochet book in German.  It's by a French crocheter Cendrine Armani, and it's got the cutest crocheted animals ("les doudous" in French, which basically means a child's stuffed animal or security blanket) traveling on an adventure around the world together.  Now, I don't know a lick of German, but once you figure out the German abbreviations for single crochet, double crochet, etc. (and the book has plenty of pictures), then it's not so hard to figure out the pattern instructions (plus I can always ask Jean to translate for me :-)



And, last night, I was in Barnes & Noble looking for Inside Crochet magazine when I came across the premiere issue of Love of Crochet magazine, which has been launched by the Love of Knitting publishers.  I haven't really had a chance to go through it, but with a flip-through, there's a real variety of patterns in there, though I also felt that I had seen some of them before in other places.