Completed Afghan

Well, almost exactly two years (ouch) after my last post about it, and who knows how long after I actually started, I'm here to say my granny square sampler afghan is done!  I wish I'd gotten it pinned up more square.  The blocks mostly came out of The Granny Square Book.  There are lots of repeat blocks and a few where I kind of did my own thing.  Many of them have extra dimensional flowers crocheted on top.  It really is a sampler- no real unifying color scheme and no real unifying block theme.  Probably I should have stuck to either a color scheme or just one or two blocks but that's ok.  It's eclectic and colorful which makes me happy.  It's pretty large, about 85" x 65".

Here are a few close ups of the blocks.  I'm really fond of both of these.

The big yellow one here was one I made up, and it really is very floppy.  I had to pin up all those petals to even photograph it.

Even though they're all granny squares, they were really all the same size, and there was a whole row of big white ones in the middle that didn't require as many blocks to make the row.  I just sort of eased them all together.  I think a crochet judge would really ding me, but this definitely isn't for show.

I was going to block it more square after washing, but alas things went awry. First off, I used cotton washcloth yarn for the whole thing.  I would NOT recommend this for an afghan.  It's really heavy and not as soft and snuggly as you'd like for an afghan.  Then, the pink yarn bled all over the white when a couple blocks got wet.  So I put it in the washer for a couple of cycles with some dawn to try to get out all the extra dye (like you would with a quilt) but I guess it didn't like that because one of the yarns really really disintegrated and left giant giant clods of linty bits all over the whole quilt.  Several others were also pretty bad.  In spite of long tails that were woven in, in several places the yarn had actually worn away leaving bits floppy and really messed up.  I'm not sure why this happened, I wash my dishcloths made with the same blocks and the same yarn all the time, with no problems.  Maybe it's because usually there are one or two dishcloths in a whole load of other wash instead of just the afghan with all yarn to rub?  Anyway, the result is that when you look at it close it now looks like an afghan that's decades old and been washed and washed and washed.  It'll still be snuggly, but I'm really hacked. 

Bonus, it was the project that had been on my UFO list the longest, so I'm super glad it's finished.