The Endless Ends Afghan

Insane. Insane. Insane. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. That's how I feel about myself for taking on this project and having a major bout of obsessive compulsiveness kick in (about finishing what I start) didn't help.

It all began when I found a photo of an afghan. I liked the looks of it immediately and it suited my geometric design impulses so very nicely. I filed it away in my afghan patterns folder to wait for the right time. When I was looking for an afghan pattern, with the intent of stash busting some pink yarn, this pattern jumped out as a perfect project. It's not the first afghan that I've picked apart from a photo (oops, never blogged about that one! details soon). Warning signs did not light up during this phase.

The first thing I needed to do was to graph the granny squares. Picking out the pattern was a challenging puzzle and great fun. In retrospect, I should have stopped here, but again, no serious warning bells were going off.

Once I had the pattern graphed I knew that it was going to take 145 white squares, 66 dark color squares and 66 light color squares. Yep, 277 squares. Major warning bells should have gone off at this point but I was still having a blast knocking off the design.

Quick math determined that a 4" square would make the afghan 84" across at the widest point and a 3" square would make it 63". So I searched my pattern books and the internet for a 3" square that would be interesting (a simple granny square was not going to "pop" the design.) I found the perfect square in the Leisure Arts publication 99 Granny Squares to Crochet. It's square #75 and the interesting middle is done by turning the granny square around to the wrong side and working a sc and dc in each stitch around and then turning back to the front to work the final round (since the pattern is copyrighted I can't give any more hints than that!)

So I merrily began crocheting 277 squares. Each square only took about 10 minutes to do and hey, it was crocheting so it was fun. The warning bells finally began to scream when I started to sew the thing together ...... have you done the math on how many ends there are to sew in?? If you have, you are soooooo much smarter than I am. There are two ends for each square + two more for sewing one to another + two more for putting each strip together. BUT -- sewing the strips together took more than one color, after all, I couldn't sew a pink to pink portion with white yarn. I sewed in almost 1000 ends. I was insane. I was stupid.

I edged the afghan with a reverse single crochet but I was so fed up with the thing by this point that I don't think I executed the stitch properly - it doesn't look like cording. It did look better than regular singular crochet so I just left it.




My Ravelry project page - Endless Ends Afghan