I'm not sure how I came across the Great American Aran Afghan, or indeed its compatriots: The Great American Afghan , The Great North American Afghan and, The Great American Kid's Afghan. I'm pretty sure I bought the pattern booklets from The Wool Shack, although I know they don't currently stock them. I'm also sure I bought them years ago and have been dreaming of this project for a long time.

In preparation for this Aran blanket, I did a practice run - the mohair shawl I knitted for my mum. I started the shawl in April 2009 and finished it in August 2010. It was a reasonably easy project to start learning to knit cables; just a rectangle with lots of repeating cable patterns.
Once that was done, I was free to purchase the wool for the Great American Aran Afghan, which I did, in September 2010. After hours of reading on the Ravelry site, I chose Cascade 220 Superwash. It has a pop star status on Ravelry (75,000+ projects list it as the yarn of choice). Boy, it would be good to have shares in that one! During my research, I was very tempted by a Blue-Faced Leicester wool from England but the postage was nearly as much as the wool!
After the wool arrived we took off for a trip during the school holidays of October 2010. We rented a campervan from near Sydney airport and drove up the north coast of NSW, visiting my sister and her family in Byron Bay, and eventually dropping the van off in Brisbane before flying back to Sydney and driving back to cosy Canberra. It was over a week of travel and we had a really interesting trip and it was fun to catch up with family and we saw some beautiful countryside shrouded in rain. It rained nearly every single day of the trip, until we got back to Canberra, where it was drizabone. Luckily the days we spent in Byron, which included a walk to the lighthouse and a trip to Wet and Wild theme park on the Gold Coast, were sunny days. All the other days were wet and reasonably cold. At one stage, the Pacific Highway was closed due to rain and of course, later in the year, Brisbane was under water. It was a pretty wet 2010. Looking back, or maybe looking forward, we really should do that trip again, but maybe in the more typical Il Nino.




One of the outcomes was that I did a lot of knitting. We had been upgraded in the choice of campervan and the one we got was just way too big for me to drive. I admire my husband and any other person who drives those things, but to me, it was just a great, big, huge truck. It was comfortable inside and we all had a really good time and often I was grateful for the coziness of the campervan while the wind and rain was beating on the windows and roof. But I don't think we'd take a beast like that on a holiday again. It was hard to manoeuvre, park and turn. It was expensive in caravan parks and you couldn't take it to out-of-the way spots because it couldn't travel on anything except a very good quality road. I'd go for something smaller, more nimble next time.

The knitting though...the knitting...well in the week away I managed two squares from the Great American Aran Afghan.
Ann Strong and Hanna Burns. Both are quite pictorial patterns. Ann's is reminiscent of pomegranates and Hanna's is of DNA.

I took notes as I went and the Ann Strong block went like this:
- ripped out at row 5
- ripped out at row 6
- ripped out at row 7
"Wow! going to take me a really long time at that rate!. Didn't follow the pattern carefully enough".
Once I started paying attention to the pattern (ie reading it properly) I was fine and it was done in a day.

The Hanna Burns one though - My notes record that -
OK. Officially humbled by this block. I've made mistakes in the DNA, the trinity stitch (the bobbles), and the single column cables. So ripping out over and over again has been for different problems. [emphasis in the original]. I remember sitting on my sister's couch and ripping out a whole column of stitches back to the beginning, re-knitting those stitches until I rejoined at the top again and pressing on. As my notes indicate, I did this more than once! To make matters worse, both blocks are rated as "EASY". In total, I spent 29 hours on that block alone! I also remember while Tim and Nick climbed around the Adventure Parc at Mount Tambourine in the rain, Tess and I sat at the wood-fired pizza cafe and ate pizza, drank warm drinks and she drew pictures while I knitted and ripped and knitted this block. It was a great holiday. True. I remember the trip very fondly and though daunted by my rocky start to the project, I'm keen to press on. The next block is Jay Campbell.