1 post tagged “crochet wip”

Over the summer, Hubby's Nana destashed me a couple bags of Red Heart she's had sitting around for...if that's a year on the price tag, 20 years...and the pattern she'd intended to use with them - except that it turned out the yarn wasn't quite right for the pattern. Oops.

On the other hand, I've had the leaflet for this afghan sitting around waiting for the right yarn - which this was, more or less. Three coordinating colors - the light blue isn't quite as lurid in real life as it is in my photos. Baaaaaasically the right amount - I had to try to match the "aran" color from twenty years ago when that's one of the ones they're putting dye lots on right now (ended up with a "Pound of Love" instead of RH - the present RH Aran color has a green tone to it, mine has a yellow tone), and I'm praying I don't run out of the light blue because they discontinued that color. It's been an on-and-off project for a while, but now that the Anastasia socks are done, it's my main WIP.

Completed and photographed so far: The bottom row of the afghan. From top to bottom, please allow me to introduce:

Square #49: "Lacy Wave Stitch"
Square #33: "Silt Stitch" - and yes, it really is biased as badly as the picture makes it look, maybe even worse. Crazy stuff there.
Square #16: "Granny Square"
Square #40: "Fan Stitch"
Square #54: "Aligned Puff Stitch"
Square #36: "Little Crowns"
Square #30: "Eyelet Lace"

I'm finding that the directions for the patterns are very pedantic, sometimes to the point that they're confusing. In many cases a stitch diagram would be much simpler, but a) I think this leaflet was published before stitch diagrams really caught on, and b) then they'd've had to take five pages to explain how to read the diagrams.

I had to alter the directions for Square #30 - after a few rows, the square, well, wasn't. The first row was 7 inches wide, all nice and proper, but the following rows were more like 6 1/2. So in all the loops where it said to work 1 sc, I worked 2 sc. Voila. The picture in the booklet clearly shows only 1 sc there - I wonder if it's all related to my dc's not being quite tall enough. This square holds the record for "Most Times Ripped Back To The Slipknot" so far, at three.

I haven't assembled the row yet because I'm Pondering. The "match" yarn I got wasn't perfect - I'd call it more like 95%. My gut tells me that what I should do is edge all the RH Aran squares in the RH Aran yarn so they match perfectly, then pick random squares to be edged with the RH until I run out, and then edge the rest and the whole blanket with the other yarn. But inside, I'm whimpering at the thought of saving the assembly on 63 squares until the very end; the only way I've ever completed a blanket made out of squares before was to assemble them as I went.

I'm really kind of surprised by the yarn - the dark blue and aran everything you've always heard Red Heart is, but the light blue is...soft. Flexible. A pleasure to work with. I wonder if that's why they discontinued it - but then I've heard that about Red Heart, too, that some colors are less similar to recycled tires than others. All the same, it's not one I'd purchase on purpose; even in the realm of Super Cheap Acrylic, there are nicer yarns.

The ultimate fate of the afghan? I'll probably give it back to Nana. The yarn matches her decor much better than mine, which is why she picked it out in the first place...