Day 21: Making a Community Afghan

Tyler and his blanket

My love of yarn has even influenced the fiction books I tend to read. I did a whole series of blog posts last year reviewing some of my favorite yarn themed fiction series. But it was one of the books in the Beach Street Knitting series by Gil McNeil that inspired me to work together with several other women in my community to make an afghan for our friend's son after he had surgery.

In the third book of the series, several characters are working on squares for a baby shower afghan. They mention that the more experienced knitters are making moons and other picture squares, while the newbies are making the solid squares.

I went one step farther by asking my friends to choose a stitch pattern from my first book that they wanted to try, to give the blanket more texture. Many of them chose a stitch pattern they had not made before, and I helped then make adjustments to the square pattern to fit with all of the others. Even with different gauges in the squares made by several different people, once I added the 2 rounds of single crochet with the same number of stitches around each square, they fit together beautifully.

I was fortunate that I happened to have received a TON of extra Bernat Roving yarn on hand, accidentally sent to me for making the Happy Day Playmat (I think they shipped a bag of 3 for every 1 skein requested, and threw in extras to fill the boxes). I just happened to have all of the right colors, and lots of extra red, which happens to be Tyler's favorite color.

Because we used a bulky weight yarn, the 12 blocks made a nice size blanket, big enough to cover Tyler's bed. When we brought it to him and laid it out on the floor for him to see, he especially liked the squid-like Alien (he loves squids) and the Robot. At the moment I believe it is packed away for the summer months. But his mom told me he still loves his space blanket!

Original Tyler's Space Adventure (back side)

For more information on Reversible Color Crochet, see: http://www.interweavestore.com/reversible-color-croc...