Crochet Rainbow Afghan

My goodness!  These weeks have just flown by.  Each day I’ve been meaning to update, and suddenly the day has come and gone in a flurry of laundry, dishes, cooking and cleaning up messes, until the next morning has already dawned and I fall asleep in a heap of exhaustion.  Such are the days of a busy mother, I suppose, but at times, it makes me look back and wonder where the heck the past two months went!

We started homeschooling again this week, too.  And like every year, I start off utterly motivated and organized – hoping to sustain that a little longer with this year.   Anyway, with all the hustle going on, I’ve only been working on bits and pieces of crochet work.  So instead of going over those little bits, I thought I’d go back and share with you one of my most favorite crochet afghans that I’ve ever made – my Rainbow Afghan.

I had come across and had my eye on this afghan for years.  It had been in my “crochet” bookmarks folder way back to when I was pregnant with my first (who is now in first grade!)  So that should give you an idea of how dedicated I was to the idea of making it.

It wasn’t until one snowy January, a few years ago, when I was going through my yarn and realized that I had all the colors of the rainbow that I thought to myself, just make it!  And so that month was spent happily crocheting up these rainbows.  I mean happily in a sense that I never got bored with the project.  If you’re an afghan maker, you might identify with the feeling that I get when I’m a little over halfway done with something… but still see how far I have to go.  Sometimes it can be a little bit of a chore to overcome that repetition of making the same pattern over and over (and over… and over…)

The best thing about this rainbow afghan is that it was an absolute joy to crochet.  Not only did I not get bored with it, but I seemed to have finished in in record time – the whole thing was completed in under a month.

This was also my first work of crochet that I donated.  A local fundraiser for Cystic Fibrosis was calling out for art donations, and seeing that rainbows are a sign of hope, along with having a friend whose son suffers from CF, it felt like the right fit; like I had made the afghan for that purpose.  I donated the afghan and it ended up being the grand prize for a raffle that ended up earning a respectable amount of money for a family with CF and CF research.  I am humbled to have helped.

I plan, someday, to make another rainbow afghan just like this one.  Who knows, maybe I’ll make two or three.  Perhaps they will go to another very important cause who needs to keep the hope alive.  It certainly was a fun project to make.

I altered my afghan somewhat from the original, reversing the order of the colors (the pattern calls for violet down, I did red at the top and went down instead.  I also took out the extra puff of white at the top, and I added a chevron zigzag in rainbow colors at the bottom.  Why not?  If you like the pattern, you can find it free here, and check out my Ravelry page here.

Have a wonderful Wednesday!