WIP | The Swafghan Comes Together

The multicolored swafghan – the sweater I decided to transform into an afghan – is beginning to come together. Slowly but surely.

At the moment, I'm in the middle of the seaming process. On the left, you can see the wrong sides that will be hidden, and on the right, you can see the public sides as the front and back panel edges are joined.

I'd planned to use I-cord to simultaneously join and edge the front and back panels. The problem? I-cord gobbles yarn, and as you can see, the small ball of black yarn below is rapidly disappearing. To make the most of it, I opted for a modified version of the three-needle bind off, which is working quite well.

Because of the slipped-stitch gridwork, the individual strips line up stitch for stitch and row for row on both edges (left and right). I'm continuing to work with care to maintain this alignment as I join the front and back panels, so each strip, gridline and check matches at the top, bottom, and far left and right edges. A small misalignment wouldn't be catastrophic (let's face it, many people wouldn't even notice it), but this is one of the many little details I want to get right.

Finishing the top edge went smoothly – once I retrieved all the stitches that skittered off the needles when I wasn't paying attention.

To join the sides, I'm picking up and knitting two rows along the length of each panel and then binding off, as the first photo shows. To speed things along, I'm taking advantage of the two-layered construction to simply bury all the ends between the layers.

Reconfiguring this project has consumed time, energy, thought and yarn, so I'm determined to take it slowly and steadily. That said, I'm finding it difficult to pace myself, because I'm eager to complete these last steps and see how the finished piece looks.

I'm off now to travel through the way-back machine and revisit the origins of this endeavor. I need to find and frog every single swatch from the initial planning stages, because something tells me I'm likely to need more black yarn.


UPDATE
The pattern for the Color Check afghan (aka: the Swafghan), has been released. Click here to read more about it and/or purchase the pattern.