Six of Hearts

I've finally managed to resuscitate my Great American Aran Afghan. In honor of Valentine's Day, may I present the recently-completed Barbara Selesnick square:



This is supposed to be one of the five easiest squares. Well, sure, if you knit exactly according to the pattern. But when I tried that, it was going to come out ridiculously short; if I added a fourth vertical repeat at that gauge, it would have been too tall.

I monkeyed around with several unsuccessful modifications, but in the end, I chose to add 4 rows of reverse stockinette to the center section before and after the heart motifs.

Fidgety business: I worked the garter borders on 51 stitches instead of 55. I increased four stitches in the last row of the border, then increased another four stitches in the process of beginning the first hearts (two stitches at the base of each motif, bringing the stitch count to the expected 59 and successfully avoiding cable splay.

By the way, here's Susan Rainey's interpretation of the Selesnick square with four pattern repeats.

It slipped my mind

It's Afghan Sunday again and I've hardly touched the afghan in weeks, except to move the stack of finished squares around so the cat won't sleep on it. I did finish the Patt Tanton Hewitt square, which I was working on at the last meeting.



I went down a needle size and this square still came out a smidge oversized (12-1/4”W x 12-1/2”H, after wet blocking). You can see it's a little taller than it is wide. It would have been even taller, except that I trimmed a few rows off. I ended the lower border with a RS inc row and then started the charts on Row 2 (instead of working a foundation row consisting of the last row of each chart, which would have meant two more rows). Correspondingly, I ended the patterned section with Row 2 of chart C, and incorporated the cables of Row 3 into the RS decrease row of the upper border.

Fidgety business: I found that the M1P’s distorted the reverse stockinette too much, so I replaced each with a backwards loop cast on in the previous row. And in Row 25 of Chart C, just to be consistent, I replaced the SSK and K2tog by P2togs by borrowing a purl stitch from each neighboring panel.

Here’s a hint I saw on Ravelry just after I finished: use two different-colored DPNs for the cable calisthenics. (By the way, Ravelry has a group devoted entirely to this project, and it's full of helpful and amusing people.) The tightness of the stitches while working those multi-strand cables made working this square physically tiring and hard on my wrists, but the high "ooh pretty" factor gives you a pretty high return on your investment.

I've almost finished the Salazar square, too. Here's a shot of the center section; I've got the borders done and sewn on now. Maybe I'll finally wrap up the chain stitching this afternoon.