The Manly Scrafghan

Scrafghan: (noun) scrˈaf-ˌgan : a blanket or shawl knitted or crocheted from many different colors or types of yarns. (scrap+afghan)

~My dictionary of dumb definitions for words that don't exist... but should!

Several days ago my mother entreated my with a quest. Nothing so droll as running out and slaying monsters or beating the hoards of cats back from the basement. No. I was to protect the integrity of the very walls of the farmhouse she lives in. Save the chairs from a cruel fate! Preserve the sheen and appearance of the 1970's fake wood paneling!!

I needed to make her an afghan.

So, the yarn warrior rode again, digging through the nameless trenches of ages old stash. Stash so old everyone had forgotten where it was bought. Stash that surely bore the horrors of things like nameless forgotten scratchy wools and acrylics so cheap they would curdle milk. What would come of thise project... time would only tell.

~*~*~*~*~*~

So, yes. My mother wants an afghan. For the express purpose of putting it on the back of the chair my Dad sits in to watch TV.

Now my Dad is an older man, and the years (and beers) have not worn well on his frame. He has bad knees and therefore has a tendancy to not so much sit as to collapse into any given chair. Therefore the wall behind his favorite chair gets decimated if there is no padding between chair back and wall. That's where the afghan comes in.

He has an afghan on his chair. Oh yes, he does. Or did. It is his afghan. My great grandmother made it for him in the 1970's. Much of my parents house still dates to the 1970's. Anyways, it was a fine afghan, one of the few knit afghans in the house (most of them are crocheted because most of the grandmothers crocheted more than they knit), with wide chevrons done in knit and purl ridges, in dark brown and white. Nothing wrong with it... well there wouldn't have been anything wrong with it had half of the afghan not been made in wool with half made in acrylic.

See how it has big stripes? Some of the stripes are wool. Some aren't.

Well, my Dad sweats. Most men sweat. So when he would use the afghan and get sweaty the afghan got smelly. After decades my mother decided the afghan needed a wash because it was rank. All of the other afghans in the house were either all wool or all acrylic. This one said on a very old card that it was all acrylic, so my mother out it in the washing machine on gentle and washed it before hanging it on the line to dry.

And then she noticed that some stripes had felted, some hadn't.

Whoops.

So I dug through the big old stash of bulky yarns that time forgot. Some I bought (shame on me...). Some my mother bought (shame on her...) and some that we didn't know where the hell they came from. I pulled out everything that was in the olive/gray/brown color scheme and then all the neutrals. I figured if this was a sacrifice afghan, I was going to make it the easiest and quickest way I knew how: interlocking shells of crochet with an N hook.

So now the challenge is to make this big pile of unknown scrap yarns look like something that really meant to be an afghan without killing some of the yarns in the process. (I hate you, Lion Brand Cheille Thick and Quick... do you hear me? )

So far, not so bad!