Finally safe to post afghan #4!

I'm not sure if this will post very well; the wifi here seems to be acting up a bit tonight. But, here it is, finally, Miss E's afghan! This is entirely my own design, and overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Of course, me being me, it's also quite mathematical. Basically the number of rows in each pair of red/white stripes adds up to 8, and each row is done in single crochet. So we have 7,1,6,2,5,3,4,4,3,5,2,6,1,7,1,6,2,5,3,4,4,3,5,2,6,1,7 starting and ending with red. As I said, I'm pretty happy with it in general. I think E will really like the colors, and especially after a run through the washer with some fabric softener, it's pretty soft and snuggly, and since it's a dense single crochet it'll be pretty warm as well. I think it snowed there today, so I hope it's coming in handy!


But there's always room for improvement, right? I'm not posting the photos that show the errors most egregiously, but you can kind of see in this one that I didn't exactly get the edges very straight. I'm not quite sure how I managed that, honestly, because it was just single crochet. I'm actually going to have to go back to the yarn and see if the red and white are exactly the same thickness, because it seems that the more consecutive white rows I have, the shorter the rows each become. Or maybe I just had symmetrical differences in my gauge while I crocheted it, who knows.

I do know that there will never be another afghan exactly like this, or at least not made by me, because really, that single crochet is boring, boring, boring. *Yawn.* It makes me tired just thinking of it. Also, the parts where there's just one row, it doesn't show very well on both sides of the afghan. I think if I were to repeat, I'd go for a double crochet and be happy with thicker stripes and maybe do a sum of 5 or 6 instead of 8. But this pattern will be on hiatus for a good long while, especially since it's time to get started on the Christmas knitting.

Once again I turned to my friends at Caron for Simply Soft, because it was the best red color that I could find. It's worked lengthwise in single crochet with about an H or I hook, I forget which. Probably I. Just chain until you get a length a bit longer than the afghan you want, then start single crocheting in stripes as listed above. Simple pimple. I also learned, finally, how to sew in ends on color changes without having it show, and that makes me happy.

One final note, and this is why I waited a week after E got her afghan to post this. I was in London over Thanksgiving, having a fantastic time seeing some of the usual tourist spots and a few of the not-so-usual, like Hampton Court Palace and the world-famous maze there. For anyone who knows me who still hasn't read Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, what on earth are you waiting for? Jerome's observations about basic human nature are as true and fresh today as they were nearly 120 years ago. You probably know someone just like Uncle Podger from Chapter 3. The episode of Harris in the Hampton Court Maze is only a couple of pages long, but it served to make the maze famous. It's even mentioned in the book about the Historic Royal Palaces that we got. Go read Three Men in a Boat and then, if you liked it, check out Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was inspired by it.

Next up: Christmas knitting, the variety that is Christmas presents that must be finished by 25 December. (The other kind of Christmas knitting is what one does on Christmas vacation after the presents are all knitted.) I won't be posting much of the first kind of Christmas knitting, because I don't want people to know what I'm making. Maybe I'll go back through my photos of previously-finished projects just to keep something happening here. Tune in in a couple of weeks to see what I dig up from my crafting past!