My sister Carolann taught me this stitch about three years ago. Totally simple--3 chains and 3dc, diagonal increases and decreases. Mom had been making a smallish blanket with the stitch but hadn’t finished it before her death, so I spent my regular Father’s Day/June 2006 vacation week with her and my father, completing the blanket Mom had started. I didn’t like Mom’s choice of color or wool (some kind of strange, discontinued variegated acrylic called “Wedgewood” from Red Heart, ugh!), but insofar it was a labor of love and a way to remember Mom, I put my aesthetic snobbery aside. What I did like, though, was the wonderful texture the stitch created, plus EASY EASY EASY! One of those great stitches you can practically do with your eyes closed.

So, after coming back to Berkeley, I went to Stonemountain and Daughters and found Cascade Pastaza, a wool-alpaca blend, (natural fibers--ahhhhhh!), and after some haggling with Cascade to get 40 skeins of the yarn in one shipment, my vision was realized: the stitch and this yarn yielded a beautiful, heavily textured, substantial afghan that looked and felt almost woven.

Since then I’ve made 15 of these afghans, some given as gifts, some sold or auctioned for charity, some made on commission, some still sitting in my closet, and of course, one in progress.

With the encouragement of Diana at Stonemountain, I wrote up the pattern and “sold” it to Cascade for their website, for which I received 40 skeins of wool for free, which I thought was a great deal. And Stonemountain actually had me pose with the first two I made for their own website:

http://www.stonemountainfabric.com/pages/gallerycustomerr...

Anyway, these are just four examples of the ones that I’ve made since then, and, yes, it’s an obsession! I spent my Hawaiian cruise last year working on one, a source of endless fascination for the passengers and the staff (I guess you don’t see middle-aged men crocheting enormous pieces of textiles at 6am off the back deck of the ship every day), and I carry one in progress around with me just about everywhere. Pretty much everyone I know has gotten used to me hauling it out after dinner, during the movies, on long car trips, etc. etc.

I have tried other wools mostly for the purposes of economizing a little or testing out other textures--Cascade’s Eco-wool (Carolann has that one for last year’s Christmas gift), Rowan Aran Tweed (Padma and Scott have that one, in a beautiful deep teal blue, at their river house, so I get to visit it frequently)--but in the end, there is no getting around it: the weight, nap and final worked-up effect of Pastaza is perfect. Once you’ve fallen in love, what else is there to say? “Et si nous nous aimons, cherchez pas la raison, c’est parce que c’est si bon!”