It all began very innocently. A lovely afghan for my mom in the pattern my grandmother had used for the afghans she'd made for my dad, sister and myself (mine is in 3 shades of lime green - jealous?). A few years ago I'd used the feather/fan pattern to run one up for my brother(reds). Now it was mom's turn. Her birthday was coming up, did I have any other bright ideas? nope. damn.
Mom's a painter, mom does landscapes, mom used to take me field sketching when I was a tot. When asked her favorite color she replies "Oh, I like 'em all". I thought I'd just run up a rainbow to settle her hash.
Koigu has all those nice colorways. Hmm, an afghan on 3's. Ah, what the heck, ya only have one mom and she's a lot of fun.
Well, Koigu has MOST of the colors in the rainbow - or MLYS carries most of their colors + white. Dyeing stuff pays my bills. Looks like I could emulate Maie Landra's approach and fill in the missing hues. And so it began.
It …got …a… little …out… of… hand.
Knit a little, dye a little, knit some more. Keep going, onward - ever onward … water … gasp … choke … scrape … drag … 2,000 knitting hours later what you're looking at is 27 skeins of the stuff (wonderful stuff, I love working with this yarn. The feel of it running through my fingers, the finished fabric, the washability of it - it isn't marketed here in the states as washable wool but I'll tell you a little secret … throw that stuff in the dryer baby, no points off). I filled in slightly less than half of the colors. It's ombréd with alternating rows to move the color changes along.
That puppy is huge. It's 8 (eight) feet long, it's a good 5 feet wide. It is built for napping, bring a friend. Afghan? Hell, it's the entire country. It's a g.d. topographical map, with rivers.
Friend "G" suggests it would make a nice Gay Pride burka.
It was a little tough to give it away … the siren song of all of those colors … perdition
My God - the afghan. I thought it was just an urban legend, yet here is proof that it exists. Welcome to the blogosphere...
Posted by: MBT | July 06, 2006 at 11:14 PM