Two Down, Three to Go!

Hooray for me! I finished off the baby afghan for CK, and Aunt C will be taking it to its new home in Seattle tomorrow. I'm so pleased with how it turned out, I can hardly stand it. I was not sure that the 3-D "tumbling blocks" effect would actually work in the medium of crochet, and very happy when it actually did.

I think most of the credit needs to go to the clever (but uncredited) designer for some really slick shaping. There are stitches of different heights in the first round, but after that it's just double crochets and chains. It's extremely easy to do, and I think makes it look nicer than if there were more different stitch heights. There's a uniformity to it that's really appealing.

My only complaint is that, being printed on the 2-sided flier as it was, there wasn't enough room to chart the pattern via symbol crochet. (I know I wasn't clear about this before, but that complex-looking diagram down on the April 25 post, the concentric ovals, is actually what I had to do to get the pattern straight in my own brain. That oval translates into one of the blocks, as shown at the bottom of the May 23 post.) That whole thing about a picture being worth 1,000 words is really true here. Being a visual person, I had to see how the stitches related to each other to be able to internalize it. Luckily I was able to interpret the words and create that diagram, which is what made this project happen.

This is the first afghan I've worked in join-as-you-go motifs, and I have to say I'm really a fan. For one thing, there's no whipstitching or crocheting together, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. For another, you finish one motif before you start the next, actually breaking off the yarn. This makes it super-easy to sew in the ends of each motif as you go. I'd like to state for the record that I did indeed sew in the ends of every motif and half-motif before starting the next one, and that's the reason that I finished this afghan on Tuesday instead of six weeks from now. When you do color changes, you drop one yarn and pick up the next within the same stitch, and it's easier to keep going than to stop, pick up a needle, and sew in the end.

On to Baby Afghan Number 3! (Already 6" tall, and super-cute.)