Commission
Dan (DH) commissioned me to make 2 blankets for our daughter in law’s family. He wanted North American yarn (We used Prairie Spun DK from Brown Sheep Yarns, it’s spun in Nebraska from Targee wool raised in the USA), and New England motifs. My DIL mentioned that red was her family’s favorite color. That reminded me of the New Year Knots we gave out at her wedding, so I wanted to echo the look of the knots. (I have knots all over my apartment, this one is on the fridge.)
Accepting ends to weave
I was going to edge the whole blanket, having one corner with a knot, but I’d only picked up one side and it felt like a wrestling match. So four flat sides and four fancy corners there. I did sigh over all those ends to weave in (a lot). Picking up stitches was less annoying than usual because I had already decided on pickup rates for various stitches for the inside frames and sashes. Then I broke the yarn, and returned to the other side with the front facing me (sighing as I did so.)
Next I made a 4 st I cord with provisionally cast on stitches about 5 inches long. I decreased one stitch, and (joining it to the blanket picked up stitches) made a row of Inserted I cord. When I’d worked all of the stitches from my pick up line, I increased one stitch, and ended with 5 inches of 4 st i cord, putting the live stitches on my broken yarn end.
I experimented with adding another inserted I cord directly on top, but it rolled like stockinette stitch. So I turned the blanket, and put a row of purl stitches in on top of the inserted I cord. (As it happens, the whole edging still wants to curl a bit, but not anywhere near as badly as it did before.)
I worked another repeat of inserted I cord and purls, then ended with an I cord bind off, that had 4 st I cord beginning and ending with live stitches.
So: the exciting corner! I wove in the purl row ends.
Then I wove the 6 I cord tails. (whispering Under, Over, Under to myself as I did it.) I kept the weave in place with some safety pins.
I didn’t photograph them, but there were some experiments. I tried just joining the ends in a loop, but my woven corner loosened into the loops. Then I twisted a center I cord to get a pretty twist loop, eyeballed it to the side, frogged a lot from it’s matching I cord to get it to the right height and grafted them.
Documentation
I did the same the other side and center tails. Before I wove in those ends, I took some mattress stitches to keep the twist in place and keep it looking tidy. I should have counted first, but it turns out that both my side loops had the same rows in them, so sometimes eyeballing works.
My first corner was the experiment, I didn’t even twist all of my loops the same way. To get the other corners to match, I made a template with notes to put behind the corners. To protect the blanket, I traced it in pencil.
Then I inked it, sketched in the weave, direction of twist, and counted stitches.
I haven’t pieced the other afghan yet, but when I do, there will be 4 more corners to go, so I’d better save the template!