My first afghan

A while back we bought this wonderful book "50 Fabulous Knit Stitches" by Rita Weiss and I had decided to begin knitting a swatch of every one of the 50 Knit Patterns within it. This would give us an idea of how the patterns behaved rather than just how they looked stretched out in a photo (not to mention it would be a great introduction to reading patterns, all sorts of increases and decreases, cabling, bobbles, etc., since up to this point all I'd done is knits and purls). I was going to split the pages of the book and reassemble the book to include swatches with every page in a ringed binder that could accommodate the added bulk of the swatches.

Well, having finally finished scarves for all my nieces and both my sisters, it was time to start that project. About a third of the way through I became inspired by a few patterns in the book to design my first afghan for my youngest niece, now just 15 months old.

At the bottom of the afghan I've used green and stockinette to create a 6in panel that I will fold under and attach on the back side of the afghan for a little foot pocket (How annoying is it to have to try to fold an afghan under your feet? Try it when you're not even TWO!). I then continued with the same green but added a lime colored eyelash yarn to make a section of grass.

Once that section was through, the real "fun" began... The Golden Glories from page 20 of Rita's book accompanied with a background of blue "Raindrops" from page 11. The flowers are in solid color in the book, but I was SURE that I could one up the pattern and make the flower centers yellow, make the bobbles for the petals a different color and make the leaves and stem section green!

Of course, to do this without passing yarn across the back and making big loops for toes to snag on that means different balls of yarn for every color change... Oh My Gosh! 5 flowers, 6 background sections between them... That's ELEVEN balls of yarn during the leaves... Umm... WAIT!... That's TWENTY-ONE balls of yarn during the Flowers! (2 for the bobbles / petals, one for the yellow center to avoid carrying yarn across the back for toe snagging / being seen through the holes in the yellow section, times 5 + 6 background balls)...

How to keep it all organized?! Well... Since knitting on circular needles forces you to cross the threads to the balls it can become an unorganized mess in 2 seconds flat. We don't have any straight needles long enough to comfortable accommodate an afghan, but since we have the Addi Click needle set (a MUST HAVE if you don't have them), what I did was to use 2 cables, each cable having a US 10 and US 15 on each end. Thus I could knit from one cable to the other using the 10's and the 15's would serve as a stopper to prevent the work from falling off the other end. When I switch sides of the work, I moved to the chair on the other side of the lined up balls and flipped the work end over end in order to prevent having to turn the work and cross all the threads. (Oh, you can't see the chair, but there's a chair on the other side of the coffee cups facing the couch I'm sitting on.)

I'm not even close to finishing, but here are a few shots of the work in progress...

As you can see from the last photo, the back of the flowers is clean and nearly as good as the front.

The plan is to continue with the rain for another foot or so, then switch to white for clouds and using the "Puffs" pattern on page 36 of Rita's book with some alterations to create bigger puffs, I'll make the clouds puffy. Then I'll use a Border from Rita Weiss's other book, "50 Fabulous Knitted Borders" to trim it all out.

More to come later, from "The Knit Snob".