Wedding Afghan #2

My brother and his new wife are successfully married. It was a beautiful ceremony, and I was happy to have been able to celebrate it with them. It also gave us the chance to give them the second wedding afghan. (The first you may remember went to another brother early this summer.)

Pattern: Cross Your Heart by Lesley Stanfield
Pattern Source: Adorable Crochet for Babies and Toddlers
Yarn: Ella Rae Classic (18 skeins) and some Valley Yarns Greenwich
Hook: G / 4.00 mm

The original pattern is meant to be a baby blanket, but the pattern gives no yardage requirements or suggested size. Knowing I had more than 4000 yards of the Ella Rae in my stash though, I figured that would be fine.

The only problem was that the more I thought about it, the bigger I wanted this blanket to be. Both my brother and his new wife are generously sized people, and I wanted this to be big enough to be comfortable curling up together under. Ultimately it was big enough to quite comfortably cover a twin bed.

Unlike the example in the book, this was done mostly in just two colors: the grey and green Ella Rae. Then the edging around each block was done in a brighter blue that I had bought a cone of at Webs a while back. That gave it just a touch of interest without being overwhelming once the grey seams went on.

This was actually a fairly fun project. I memorized the heart motif fairly quickly. I am not sure how long these took since I just sort of did them on the fly whenever I had downtime. But I found that I could do 10-12 of the blue edgings in an hour once I had. So given the number of squares that meant I spent more than 16 hours just putting on the edgings.

The major downside to this pattern was the seaming. Since each square was only about 4"/10 cm there was a lot of seaming to do. Each of the seams going the short way took half an hour (so another 7.5 hours there), and I didn't dare time myself to see how long the long seams took each.

By the end of it, I was quite ready to be done. There was some extra excitement though, since I ran out of the grey yarn. I only used 8 skeins of each color on the squares, but I used a full 2 skeins on the seaming with not quite enough left to do the other edge in single crochet.

Modifications: I followed the instructions pretty much exactly. (Shocking I know!) The only exception was that I couldn't find the book among the boxes to see what the final edging was supposed to be, and I opted to do a half double crochet border in the green, while I did the seaming with the grey (in the recommended single crochet edging).

Final verdict? Cute pattern, which was fun to do. Ultimately it took way too long though, because I opted to make it huge. Good thing I love my family so much. I wouldn't mind using the heart motif in another project, but I would would love to do less seaming in whatever I did it in.