Baby Afghan Finally Finished

I started making a baby afghan quite some time ago.  I was going to make it for a lady at church, but it was taking me too long, so I put it aside and decided it would be for someone else that would be having a boy.  I started in again after Christmas, intending on making it for Joey's teacher.  I took a trip to Maine and needed something to work on, but since the afghan needed to carry six balls of yarn across for each row, I knew it would be too much to try to keep straight in the car.  It is hard enough to keep six balls of yarn at once working without getting tangled, even when I have lots of room to do it in.  Anyway, I decided to once again abandon the afghan project for that baby, and made the sweater I showed last time, instead.  After I got back home and had finished the sweater, I decided to get back to the afghan, this time intending it to be for my friend's daughter who is having a boy.  I designed this afghan on my own.  I am quite pleased with the outcome, but it was a little difficult to do with so many balls of yarn being used at one time.  It took awhile to figure out, but after doing it so many times, I finally found a way to arrange my balls and cross them as I was going, to be sure they would not be tangled in a knot when I got to the end of each row.

Afghan is done all in once piece, except for the shapes.  I made them separately and sewed them onto the blocks.

 My biggest challenge with this was to make the shapes.  I had intended on making a circle, square, triangle, and rhombus.  However, when I finished my first shape, it was an octagon, instead of a circle.  I soon realized that it was easier to make straight edges, so I proceeded to make these shapes.  I was still going to make the square, but decided it would cover up too much of the background, so I changed it to the pentagon.  The rhombus was the only shape that turned out as I had envisioned it in the beginning.  The triangle had to be changed to the hour glass shape, using the two triangles, because I couldn't figure out how to get it tall enough with the number of stitches wide that I was limited to.  All in all, I think it looks fine this way.