The Birth of an Afghan

I crochet a lot, usually making several afghans a year.  If it weren’t for crocheting, I’d never be able to sit still long enough to watch a movie or TV show; I’m just too twitchy.  But crocheting?  It’s like a form of meditation almost, when I get into the rhythm of it and my fingers fly--it bleeds off enough of that excess energy so I can sit still long enough to watch whatever it is I want to watch.

A new afghan sometimes takes no effort at all--it’ll be a pattern I know and I’ll have plenty of yarn, and so not have to worry about arranging a pattern so as not to run out of a vital color.

Other times, though, it can take me a week or more to get going, which was the case with my current project.  This afghan is one I’ve had in my head for a long time, but that I didn’t have the yarn for.  It’s wool, which is expensive, so it took me a while to buy all the yarn needed.

Finally, though, I had the yarn, albeit just barely enough.  This is because I bought the yellow and green some time ago, then bought the purple (it’s a rainbow pattern), and then the other colors.  When I bought the yellow and green, money was very tight and I didn’t get as much as I would have liked, buying only five skeins of each instead of six or seven.  The manufacturer stopped making that shade of green and there wasn’t another suitable, so the amount of green I had would be the limiting factor in whatever pattern I chose.

Finally, though, I had enough yarn.  The next step was to choose a pattern.  I’d had one particular one in mind, but it wouldn’t work for reasons that don’t matter here.  The young man I was caring for at the time (he was post-surgery) pointed out that rainbows should have a curved pattern, so I brought my book of ripple patterns and we looked through it.

**When a pattern is new to me, I make a small sample piece of it to see how it works and if I like it.  If I do like it, then I make a piece using one entire skein of the yarn I’ll be using, then measure that piece to figure out how many square inches per skein that particular yarn will make in that particular pattern.  This is especially important when I have a limited amount of one or more colors, as it wouldn’t do to be going along and then find out I’ve run out of yarn when the afghan is a foot or two shorter than I am.

I made several small samples, not being particularly pleased with the first several but finally hitting on one I really liked.  It’s a pattern that I’ve been wanting to use for some time, but always avoided because it’s single crochet (a small stitch) and so would take longer than an afghan made with a bigger stitch.  Since this afghan was to be for me and out of real wool, I decided it could be made with a small stitch because the yarn and I were worth the extra time.

But there was a problem with the pattern, a problem that happens on a lot of ripple patterns.  The ends of the first rows end up curling outward because the initial chain and first row or two are usually bigger than the rows that follow.  Never mind why, just trust me, or I’ll bore you even more with an explanation.  That curl drives me bats.  Absolutely bats.  (Not that it’s a far drive from me to bats.)

My sample had that curl.  I made another sample, making some adjustments to the first row, but there was still a bit of a curl.  After several more samples, I’d hit on a way to get the curl to go away. 

**A hint to beginning crocheters out there: the pattern is all well and good, but if something happens that you don’t like, guess what, you can alter the pattern!  To compensate for something like this, I usually remove some stitches from the ends of the first row, then add them back bit by bit in the next rows.

Then I had to decide a stripe pattern.  Most crocheted things are made with a horizontal pattern, as crocheting doesn’t lend itself to complex color patterns the way knitting does.  I knew I wanted to make a rainbow, but I didn’t want a straight six colors and then repeat, but instead wanted to go up the rainbow from purple to blue to green to yellow to orange to red and then a purple stripe and back down the rainbow again, red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple, and then back up the rainbow again.  You see?

But, there was a problem there.  I had only five skeins of green, so would be using five skeins per color.  Five stripes of each color would mean that I would go up the rainbow and down, then up the rainbow and down, then up the rainbow again and stop.

No way could that work.  Not with my OCD self.  I could never leave myself hanging there at the top of the rainbow; there would have to be a way to get back down again.

A word on stripes: most afghans are color one/color two/color three (or some variation thereof) in stripes of an even or symmetrical number.  Do you have any idea how boring that gets, after forty years of crocheting?  It’s mind-numbing, and I don’t mean in the positive meditative sense of mind-numbing.  It’s dull, boring, and repetitive.  Think catatonia-inducing v contemplative.

So, I try to avoid that.  Sometimes I’ll make the afghan symmetrical around a center axis, other times I’ll make some stripes symmetrical but then have a secondary and asymmetrical pattern doing something else entirely.  Sometimes I don’t make the stripes even but instead crochet a skein until it ends and then start the new color right there, instead of starting each new color at one side or the other as is usually done.  

Back to my rainbow afghan.  Since I had a limited amount of yarn that would make an afghan about as small as I ever make them (because I like to be covered from my nose to my toes, the heck with the traditional 50” by 60” size), I had to use every scrap of every skein.  My rainbow had to have colors ending wherever they would.  This was a good thing, as I like the vaguely patchwork patterns that result.

But I was still stuck with the fact that I had an odd number of skeins per color but needed an even number so I could get back down the rainbow again.  What to do, what to do, what to do.

Aha--I had it!  I could divide each skein in half--that would get me ten balls of each color.  Remember that little mention of OCD up there?  Well, I wasn’t going to just guesstimate where the middle was in each skein.  I brought our kitchen scale out to the side table next to my crocheting chair.  Each skein was supposed to be 50 grams, but I only found two or three of my thirty that were that.  Most were 51 grams and some were 48.  I weighed each skein, then left it on the scale as I pulled out yarn and wound it into a ball.  When the amount of yarn left on the scale was half what I started with, I cut off the ball I’d wound up and then wound up another ball with the remaining yarn.  I did that for each of the thirty skeins, ending up with sixty balls of yarn that were anywhere from 24 to 26 grams each.  There were ten balls of yarn of each color, meaning I could come back down the rainbow every time I went up it.

Then it was time to start the afghan itself.  Starting an afghan is a bitch.  That first row has to be done so carefully, so consciously, each stitch counted and recounted.  A mistake in that first row means tearing it all out again and doing that blasted row over.  

**Another hint to beginning crocheters out there: you don’t have to count the initial chain.  Really, you don’t.  Make a chain a couple of feet longer than the afghan will be wide, make your first row of whatever stitch and pattern, then cut off the extra chain to within a couple of inches of the afghan and unpick those couple of inches.  SO much easier than trying to count to two hundred and sixty-seven or whatever number of chain stitches is dictated by your pattern.

Remember back at the beginning of this interminable explanation of the birth of this afghan where I wrote that I’d done the math to figure out how many square inches this particular afghan would be?  It was projected to be about fifty by seventy inches.  But when I did my sample, it didn’t feel like it would be seventy inches but instead would be shorter by a little bit.  Shorter wouldn’t work.  A couple of inches narrower would be much better than several inches shorter, because I’m 5’ 7” and want the afghan to cover my toes, not stop at my ankles.  Or shoulders.  There has to be enough to tuck under my toes and over my shoulders.

So I second-guessed my math, which never works but which I keep doing anyway.  Instead of doing the eighteen ripples my math dictated, I did seventeen.  And I got that afghan a few inches long and measured and measured and damn it all to hell no matter how many times I measured the seventeen ripples would have made too long an afghan; it needed eighteen ripples to make it work.  The measuring I’d done on that initial sample just didn’t quite correlate.

I ripped out that beginning and started again, eighteen ripples this time.  

And it worked.  I got the first purple stripe and where the yarn ran out, I started the blue stripe.  And so on and so on and so on.

The afghan is half done now and I couldn’t be more pleased.  There’s enough asymmetry that I’m not bored at all with the work or the appearance of it, but the color pattern is as regular as could be, the usual rainbow colors (and yes I know I left out indigo) in the usual order.

It’s so pretty.

(If any man has read this blog entry to this point and thought, “oh thank goodness, I thought it would never end,” now you know how pregnant women feel.)