My son got married on April 15, 2011. I started this afgan in January of the same year and finished in September (oops! just a little late). I used the Girasole pattern by Jared Flood. I just love his designs! After knitting several swatches, I settled on a yarn spun by my husband that is 80% mohair and 20% wool. Here it is before dyeing - a lovely, creamy natural color.
I kettle dyed it with Jacquard acid dye from Dharma Trading Co. I used Golden Orange with just a pinch of blue to make it more mustardy. When the water began to clear I took the yarn out. There was still quite a bit of color in the water, though, so I added one last skein to it and got the lovely yellow skein.
I decided to use two strands at a time to get a nice heavy blanket, and after months and months of knitting I found that the afgan was very unmanageable and would no longer fit on the needles the pattern suggested. I counted my stitches to see what could be wrong and found that I had made a mistake on an increase row very early on in the pattern and had been knitting 50% more stitches than I should have been. I had 960 stitches on my needles, when there should only have been 640!!. What a disaster! Since the yarn was homespun, I couldn't just throw the project away, so I frogged it all! (frog - to make a noise like a frog: rip-it, rip-it, rip-it) I started over with only one strand of yarn this time. I made amazing progress, and after only two weeks of knitting I was back to the point where I had ripped out and, indeed, had only 640 stitches. Frogging is soooo painful, but it is always worth it! I love how the afgan turned out.
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