Nautical American Flag Afghan

Yes, that's right. It's a nautical American flag afghan, made for my boss by request.

This spring, I finished up a third crochet baby afghan in about six months. I was very proud and very done with baby afghans. I mentioned my accomplishment to my coworkers one day, and the next thing out of my boss Bryan's mouth was "When are you going to make me a blanket?" I admit I laughed at him. And then I told him to ask me again in September. Let's face it, nobody wants to work on an afghan during the summer--it's just too darn hot to have draped across your lap.

Over the next few months, Bryan would mention the blanket he wanted, and we'd brainstorm ideas. July rolled around, and Bryan had made up his mind on what he wanted: a giant American flag. So I hopped on Pinterest and Ravelry and started looking for ideas and patterns. I found a few that I thought would work and that I was willing to make. Then there was more brainstorming, and Bryan upped the ante and said he would prefer a nautical American flag. Um, okay. And more Googling commenced.

Here's the general idea:

Surprisingly, I could not find a crochet pattern for this project. Time to improvise!

I found a couple of pins on Pinterest that I based the actual flag on, but I decided in the long run it would be better to make the stars and anchor separately and sew them on, rather than try to work them into the field of blue as one piece.

I also looked up dimensions for the American flag online to make sure that everything would be as close to correct as possible. Then I did some math and general sketching and some more math. (I have a degree in English, so I'm pointing this out as significant. I did math for this project.) The completed afghan isn't quite as wide as it should be if we're going for accuracy, but it's pretty close.

The more we talked about it and the more I found ideas online, the more excited I became to get this project started. So the last week of July I crunched the numbers, printed patterns, and went to Hobby Lobby and bought yarn. Once I completed the first full row to my satisfaction, I crunched the numbers again and panicked that I didn't have enough yarn, so back to Hobby Lobby I went to get more yarn in the same dye lots.

All in all, I finished this project by early October for a total of a little over two months. Of course, I didn't work on it every day (or every week for that matter), but it did go more quickly than I thought it would.

Patterns:
Eventually, the patterning boiled down to this:

• The overall look I was going for, plus an anchor: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/62346776066546367/ 
• Basic granny square stripes for the body of the afghan: http://attic24.typepad.com/weblog/2010/05/granny-striping.html 
• Stars from a fairly straightforward Christmas ornament: http://www.1dogwoof.com/2013/12/crochet-star-ornament-pattern.html 
• And an improvised anchor based loosely on one of the very few anchor patterns I could find: http://natsulog.com/lets-make-a-bigger-anchor-with-crochet/ (I used the following stitch counts for the base of my anchor, and then I went around the outside of the anchor again with half double crochet to make it slightly thicker/wider. Base stitch count: 46 double crochet stitches for the curved base, 32 double crochet stitches for the center post, 14 double crochet stitches for the cross bar, 12 double crochet stitches for the top loop.)

Materials:

• Size J crochet hook for the body of the afghan.
• Size I crochet hook for the stars and anchor.
• Yarn needle
• Tape measure
• 5 skeins white I Love This Yarn from Hobby Lobby
• 5 skeins cranberry I Love This Yarn from Hobby Lobby
• 3 skeins navy I Love This Yarn from Hobby Lobby

Final Dimensions:

• 83 inches wide (long) (I did not count how many granny square "clusters" this was.)
• 52 inches tall (28 inches blue field, 24 inches for the 6 stripes below the blue field) (117 rows of granny square stripe total.)
• Blue field: 28 inches tall (same as 7 stripes), 33.5 inches wide. 
• Red/white stripes: Each was 4.1 inches tall.* Each stripe was 9 rows of granny square stripe. 
• Stars: Each was 4 inches wide and tall.
• Anchor: Approximately 10 inches tall, 11 inches wide. 

*My original calculations were to make each stripe 4.25 inches tall; however, I failed to take into consideration that the granny square stripe pattern overlaps each row slightly. If I had realized this before the afghan was halfway complete, I probably would have changed it to 10 rows of granny square stripe per red/white stripe.

(The colors in the picture are a bit off thanks to weird lighting. I chose navy and cranberry so they would be rich and deep, but this picture doesn't quite show that.)

Overall, this project was a challenge but very fun. I'm so happy that my boss and his wife were pleased with the final product. Hooray for another successful afghan!