The third afghan I made from A Year of Afghans, Book 5. This one was for Todd’s bedroom, so he got to pick the pattern and the yarn. We bought samples of a couple of different kinds of yarn and I made swatches. Once he decided on this one we went back to get enough to finish the afghan only to find out . . . there wasn’t enough! Apparently this color (Fiesta Jewel) was in the process of being discontinued. There followed trips to every craft store within striking distance of either his house or mine and we finally gathered up enough skeins of yarn (plus a few extra as it turned out) only to run into problem number two: it was dye-lotted. Now Red Heart yarn is normally not dye-lotted so I didn’t even think about it but I guess their variegated yarns are. It became obvious when we put all our skeins from all the different stores next to each other that they didn’t match.

It turned out OK, as you can see. I used the closest matches and the fact that this afghan is made with two strands helped blend any minor differences in. But then I started using the leftover yarn to make scarves and such and I keep having to remember to use close matches or stick to projects that only need one skein because in a flat single strand pattern it can sure be obvious where I switched skeins.

Problem number three was that something about this pattern hurt my fingers. I was really glad to get this one done.