An afghan

My baby sister knows that I knit and crochet and had made afghans for other people so she asked me to make one for her. Well, she has a queen size bed but wants the afghan to be a king size. I had been planning on making one for sale anyway so I had a ton of granny squares made in a rainbow of colors so I started to sew them together. I ended up with 14 strips of 6 inch squares. For the past week I have been working my fingers to the bone putting this thing together and there has been consequences. I have one very upset cat because she can't sit in my lap when ever she wants to.

Today I can say I only have to weave in ends and cut off pieces of yarn and the afghan will be all done. It is BEAUTIFUL and will probably be made again when I have enough yarn to make all the squares again. It weights in somewhere in the 25 lb range and is very warm on my lap. It's hard to gather it all up in order to weave ends in but I'll be doing it the rest of tonight and probably most of tomorrow. My sister will be picking it up on Friday when she comes through to go to her works office. I'll be sad to see it walk out the door but happy that it's done. Then I can go back to making the knit baby blankets.

So far I have made 5 knitted baby blankets for my three nieces that have either recently had a baby or are still pregnant. Two have had their babies. One a boy so I made a blue blanket for him and the other a girl and she got a lavender one. The niece that is still pregnant doesn't want to know if she's having a girl or boy so I made her a very pretty light green blanket. I have also made two more blue blankets for my almost step-daughters who are both pregnant with boys and due this spring and early summer. They probably don't need the blankets to keep the babies warm right now but hopefully they will get use out of them in the coming winter. I am also making another lavender blanket for a woman at church who had her baby girl a few days before my niece in MD had her baby. I have making the blankets down to a science now and can make one in about 7 days, working on it when I get bored with FB and what's on the television. I also take it with me when I have appointments and before and after I work on it.

Now when I tell you that I make double knit blankets for babies I also have to tell you that I fell into the pattern quite by mistake. My mother was making one for a friends grand baby and I asked her how she did it. Well, she gave me a very brief description of how it is made and I took what she said and ran with it. I have made about 10 blankets for others including my little baby kitty. This, however, is the first time I have actually made one with baby yarn. It's totally different than working with worsted weight yarn. You need more stitches on the needle and the yarn has a tendency to separate while you're knitting with it. While I was making two of the blankets I dropped stitches which, with one, required me to take the whole thing out and start it over. The other one I was able to pick up the stitches I dropped and continue on. There are flaws if you look carefully but I may be the only one who can tell where they are because I know what to look for.

I am so happy that I still have the capacity to do both knitting and crocheting. When I started these projects I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to actually complete them. Every day that I can get a little bit more done on them I count that day as a win. So here's to winning more days