This afghan is a more recent project than the crocheted shawls of Part I. I made it from a Colinette kit bought in England in 1996. When I got home from the trip I put the kit into the cedar chest to protect the gorgeous wool and mohair and silk yarns -- and then forgot about it! A few months later I opened the chest again to get out the wool sweaters and socks for winter and rediscovered the kit. Even then I didn't start knitting it right away; iirc, I didn't actually start it until about 1998. Once I started, though, I worked diligently. The whole thing was knit on US10.5 or 11 needles, so it went fairly quickly.
The yarns were gorgeous. There were 3 different mohair colorways, one mostly navy that shaded to a lighter blue-gray, and the other two mixed blues/grays/pinks/white. There was a tweedy navy chunky wool called Skye (heavier than the worsted weight they now call Skye); a thick-and-thin wool-cotton blend called Prism in Umber and another colorway that was light gray-blue with pinks and white; and, my favorite, a plied silk yarn in a gorgeous peachy-pinky-golden beige that felt like butter through my fingers.
As you can imagine, there were a lot of ends -- I wove them in after every few squares because I knew it would be a nightmare to do it all at the end. The photo above is the back side of the afghan. It's definitely a back side to you and I, but to the uninformed eye it probably looks goodenough.
This photo shows the colors most accurately (Matthew happened by as I was tweaking it and he showed me a couple things. Techies are so useful to have around.) As the afghan grew larger and larger I found that it kept my lap nicely warm as I knit. It was so comfy that when I finally finished knitting all the squares it seemed done enough to use, and it took me nearly a year to get around to knitting the border, then another several months to weave in the final eight ends in the border. I do have a problem with that final finishing-and-letting-go thing.
No one else is allowed to use this afghan but me. I once thought I might back it with some nice cushy fabric, maybe velvet, to hide the back side, but it is so warm already that it would become unusable. So it is really and truly done. Depending on your taste, it is either the most beautiful thing ever created or the ugliest. I choose the former but YMMV.
I wrote this post almost 3 months ago, but saved it for a rainy day. Which is now, 4 days before Tax Day. What prompted me today was Wendy's mitered sweater. And then there are Cara's mitered squares and of course, the grandmommies of 'em all, Mason Dixon.
