This was meant as a sort-of “heirloom” afghan for my parents. The five intarsia panels are five of my family crests, called “mon” (in Japan, family crests are carried by both male and female, so I used family crests from both my parents’ sides).

I knit it in acrylic yarn because I want my parents to actually use the afghan, and since they have a dog, washability is key. Also, these days it’s hard to know who’s allergic to wool and animal fibers, so I also knit it in acrylic so that they can offer the afghan to a guest without worrying about allergic reactions.

Considering the amount of yarn I needed (and I overestimated how much I’d need, so I ended up with extra), I was very pleased with the PRICE of the Caron and Red Heart yarns. The afghan also ended up being a lot lighter than it would have with cotton or cotton/acrylic, and I was glad for that.

Edit: I made the intarsia designs by getting .jpgs of my family crests, printing them out, then blowing them up really big on a copier machine. Then I cut the shapes out and laid them down on knitting graph paper (I printed out several sheets and taped them together to make a bigger sheet), and traced around the edges of the cut shapes. I colored the graph paper cells with colored pencil for the black areas and left the white areas uncolored, then followed the charts when doing the intarsia. It turned out better than I expected. It really made a difference to blow the crests up so big and use a large sheet of graph paper, because then there were more cells and that made the design easier to transfer.