The Knitting Fiend

Afghans do take forever. I also don’t like knitting huge, huge pieces of fabrid. So, long, long ago, I decided to break this up into “scarves”, knit a bunch and then sew them together.

Knitting the afghan in strips has several advantages: 1) I don’t have to carry around a huge project. 2) Since I was using beautiful stash yarn from “The Jill Collection”¹, I could just knit a number of “scarves”, and when I ran out of yarn, I’m done.

As you can see, I’ve now knit 4 “scarves”. This took six 100 gram skeins of unknown yardage. I had 7 skeins so I have one left over. Last night, I laid the 4 scarves on the floor and checked their length. They seemed to be more or less the same length when I laid them on the floor, but it was difficult to smooth them completely.

I really don’t want my afghan to ripple at the seams, which it will if the panels are very different in lenght. So, I decided to rinse spin dry, air dry, dry and steam them lightly to verify that they came out precisely the same length. (Ok… I’m probalby being anal retentive here. But, I’ll be looking at this afghan. If I see obvious “boo-boos” it’s going to bug me.)

You can see them now. Those with good eyes can probably see that two of the “scarves” are a big shorter than the other two; those with even better eyes can see one of the “scarves” isn’t bound off. It’s just on a thread. Luckily, I sort of thought this might happen and budgeted some yarn to lengthen the scarves that would, inevitably, come out a bit shorter. (If I hadn’t budgeted for this, I could rip back the long ones, and then reuse the yarn to even out the lenghts. But, that involves extra knitting. So, I prefer the way I did it!)

Tonight, I’ll be picking up the stitches on the bind off end on the stumpy ones and adding about 3″ . Then, I’ll seam the pieces together. I’ll probably use the extra yarn to add a trim, mostly just to use up the extra yarn.

You thought the trim was to prevent curling? Because you saw this is all stockinette?
Nope!

Notice the rows form diagonal lines? The long edges don’t curl; they just don’t. I could explain this, but I won’t. After all, you can probably figure it out on your own.

Now, I did expect the bottom and top ends to curl toward the knit side curl a bit. They do a little, much less than I expected. For some reason, steaming seemed to cure curling even on those edges. Still, I have plenty of extra yarn and 4 rows of garter stitch (with increases at the points and decreases at the ditches) will make sure those points don’t curl at all. So, I’ll be doing that!

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1. Yarn donated to me by my Mom’s friend Jill. Jill has great taste, and the yarn is gorgeous. However, the yarn is often unlabeled which means the yardage and sometimes fiber content is unknown.