A request was made of me probably six weeks before Christmas. Would I be willing and able to make an afghan for Christmas, something in shades of reds that would be out only for the holidays and which would possibly in the future be a favorite blanket of my niece and any future niece or nephew? How could I resist?!?
I knew this would be quite the undertaking but I was willing to go for it. The request was for a plaid afghan so I made my way to Hobby Lobby to choose the yarns I wanted to use. I have made this certain pattern only once before and I did it with three colors. For this project I decided to use four colors, red, white, dark red and a variegated red and white yarn.
The project is very simple, but time consuming. The horizontal stripes are made with alternating double crochets and chains. There is a repeating pattern, each of the colors was assigned a number. For example any time I was using the red yarn I would complete five rows, the white yarn would only be one row.
I completed the pattern six times to ensure that the finished product would be long enough after completing the vertical strips.
The vertical stripes simply involved using a larger sized hook and slip stitching from the bottom of the afghan all the way to the top one row at a time. I used the same pattern for the vertical rows as I did for the horizontal. This portion of the project is time consuming because you have to be extra careful to keep tension the same so the finished piece turns out with nice straight edges.
The final step is pulling in all of the ends…let me just say there are a lot of ends, with changing yarn colors as frequently as I did for this project there were probably over 200 little tails that needed to be pulled in.
Because this was a Christmas present I had to have this done before a certain sister arrived in town for the holiday. This didn’t happen so I did have to spend a little bit of time up in my room, by myself to keep the secret for a few more days. When I was wrapping the gift up on Christmas Eve with Alice in the room with me I knew the project was a success. The blanket was laid out on the floor, just so I could make sure I liked the finished look of it and the little darling laid right down on it. When I tried to pick it up and give her a different blanket and was not a happy camper. Maybe she was tired, but I think she knew that this was going to be a special afghan for her for many years to come.
-Emily
Thanks, Em! It looks awesome on our couch! -Eliina
3E Design 