Bonnie (Mother In Law) & I are creating an afghan for Bonnie’s niece, Coty, for her wedding. Coty has a farm here in northeast Ohio and appreciates a family trinket or heirloom. The wedding was May 2013. We cooked up this idea and got to knitting in April. We quickly realized there was no chance for the gift to be part of their wedding night suite. As a fellow knitter at the shop said, “well, do you like to sleep?” We had some other distractions to keep us from completing the afghan in record speed, but are finishing the details here in July. I have concluded July is a terrible time to be knitting a wool item but I’m hoping my sweating hands won’t felt the stitches as they’re created.

This last part has been really fun. We reorganized the squares a few times, found our border yarn (4 stitch i-cord with 1 stitch from the pre-existing square), and I learned how to add log cabin frame borders on 2 pieces because they would not block large enough. We learned a lot from this project.

We each knitted 6 squares. We picked and chose from the book based on techniques we wanted to learn. My favorite square is the trinity stitch with the variegated green. It turned out so charming that even the Father in Law spent a good while holding and sizing it up. However the most technical square for me was the honeycomb. It kept rolling up and I didn’t have faith in it to turn out right. It came out much smaller than all the rest so I then had to add this border, with leftover yarns that didn’t completely match the initial vision for the square. However once completed and blocked I find it adds a throwback quality that will have future appraisers on antique roadshow incorrectly placing this blanket as dating from the 1970’s rather than originating in present day. I am quite proud of that little square.

We decided to go with a heavier weight of yarn and size 11 needles (different than the directions in the book), but stuck to the patterns. We have made a larger blanket relatively quickly, and it’s going to be very warm.