the afghan i made to spoil myself

good cause crochet afghan

So, all my life I have crocheted, pretty much. Since I started I have always wanted to make my own blanket. It has continuously been a battle of starting and stopping for many reasons (ie. I forget about it, don't like the colors any more... etc.), until now. I made my sister-in-law and brother-in-law a blanket for their wedding and became jealous of their blanket that I had made for them, so I decided it was time to make my own. The pattern I used was called "Good Cause Afghan" from the crochet today "The Ultimate Blankets Handbook" magazine.

 my tower of squares

The pattern asks to do a slip stitch joining technique which looks fine on the front, but once flipped over there's a huge ridge of slip stitches sticking out and I don't think it looks very nice, so I did a little research and found this granny square joining tutorial which I modified a bit to work with my pattern. Instead of doing the 3 dc like the tutorial said, I thought it would look a bit better (since I'm not doing a regular granny square) to do dc2tog and then dc2tog in the other square across. I may try it a bit differently next time, but all-in-all I think it turned out pretty nice.

I like the look of a thick border. I feel like when it's not thick it makes the blanket look unfinished or like maybe someone just rushed it to finish it off, but to me, that's the most important part. I did two rows of DC in off white. Then I did 1 row of HDC in the light grey. Then a row of *HDC, ch1, sk 1* in chartreuse. Then 1 row of 2HDC in ch1 space in light grey. One more row of DC, and one row of HDC in off white.

Now for the finishing touch. I used the bobble-shell edging technique I discovered on the cool blog I just linked you to. 

I love this blanket! My family also loves it, so we have a lot of cuddles in it which makes it all worth while.