I belong to a crochet Facebook Group called Life Long Crochet. The group is moderated by Charles Voth and Rebecca Mattison, who are both designers. I’ve belonged to a few crochet groups on Facebook, but this one is my favorite and the only one I regularly follow. It’s relatively small with 1,300 members and it’s nice and friendly. There is hardly any drama in this group, so it makes it an enjoyable experience. Charles and Rebecca often do Crochet-A-Longs and I participated in one several years ago, although that’s the one I’ve done (I feel too much pressure to keep up).

So a few month ago, there was a sale on Charles’ Serengeti Tank pattern at Willow Yarns. Unfortunately, the pattern is not currently published, so I don’t have a URL, currently, but will try to add it here once it is available again. I also didn’t see the post in order to get the sales price, but that’s ok.

This is the first time I actually did any swatching before starting a pattern, but I decided that since this was clothing, I probably should swatch.

I decided to use my Juniper Moon Dappled Yarn from my stash, because I’m really trying to use stash yarn where possible. I have been saving it for a cute top and it seemed like it would look really nice with this pattern. I looked at what the pattern called for and according to my math it seemed I would need two more balls to make the tank. I actually made this tank with less than the 2 balls I started with, so now I have 2 1/2 balls of this yarn and my stash has actually increased. It appears I will need to make a second one for my mom now. Oops.

There were a couple of times I got got confused, while doing the increases of the motif, but outside of being stumped a few times, the pattern was pretty easy to follow. I think it came out great. I’ll admit that I made one modification ( a little bit of a collar). I just went back and did a few rounds of scs to give the collar a little more weight.

The pattern comes with the choice of doing an A-line, which I did. It draped very nicely while I was making it. But I decided to hang it dry to block it and that pulled the stiches down, which isn’t as flattering on me with my COVID 20, so I did go back and re-block it to stretch the stiches more wide.