The Vintage Afghan Project Episode 2: The Feather & Fan Afghan

In this new blog series, I chronicle my long-term project of knitting or crocheting every afghan in a vintage Columbia-Minerva Afghans book from 1960. Although the book I am using is out of print, surviving copies are not particularly rare, just search for “Columbia-Minerva Afghans Book 742,” on EBay or Etsy if you’d like to join me on this vintage knitting journey.

Afghan No 1: Feather and Fan (No. 742-5)

Knit from: July 2024 through January 2025 (7 months)

Yarn used: Knit Picks Brava Worsted (acrylic) 3 skeins Persimmon (orange), 4 skeins Wine (dark red), 5 skeins Cobblestone Heather (gray)

As I noted in my initial entry in this series, I picked the Feather and Fan Afghan as my starting point because I was comfortable with feather and fan stitch and figured that would make for an easy first afghan. I was not wrong.  The pattern consists of two different sizes of triangles; you knit two of each in order to make a rectangular, rather than square, afghan. Once I had the hang of the pattern, I basically only looked at the instructions to check the number of stitches to cast on and then again at the end of each piece to check the last few rows (which didn’t quite follow the pattern). 

Though a large project in size, the ease of keeping track of where I was in the pattern made it a great Knit Night project, and since it was on large needles in worsted weight yarn it was also a nice break from my Big Cozy Cardigan and my other WIPs, which all seemed to be in fingering weight.

Vintage Pattern Quirks:  Prior to this project, I had never knit a pattern from a book older than myself before (I was born in the 80s) and it was interesting to see what knitting patterns from the 1960s weren’t telling you. There is no gauge listed anywhere – I suppose since the book was knit to sell Columbia-Minerva’s yarn they assumed you would use the gauge listed on the label?  There also was no yardage listed  -- the instructions said to buy 6 4 oz* skeins of color 1 and 4 4 oz skeins of colors 2 and 3 of the Columbia-Minerva Knitting Worsted Yarn.  I was able to look up the yardage for these skeins online to estimate what I needed but not having exact yardage when substituting yarn nearly proved disastrous – we’ll get to that in a second. (The number of skeins listed at the top of the post are what I *actually* needed of the Brava not what I ordered based on my yardage estimates.)

Staff kitty Yuna poses with literally all that was left of the red yarn by the end (FORESHADOWING). Meanwhile I ordered one skein too many of orange and gray.

*- I couldn’t help noticing that the Columbia-Minerva Yarns were listed at 4 oz/113 g a skein where almost all modern yarns are 3.5 oz/100 g.  I’d be curious if anyone knows when that changed and why – is it just shrinkflation or was it more about producing a round number of grams to make calculating needed yardage easier?

Additionally, I noticed some differences in techniques.  When the color changes happened, the instructions were to “tie on” the new color.  I’m not sure if that was just the term for “join new yarn” back then or if you actually were supposed to tie a knot from one yarn to the next (I opted to just join the way I normally join yarn for a color change).  Also when decreases were called for they were always K2tog or P2tog; on a modern pattern you’d be instructed to ssk and ssp on one side of the decrease row so the stitch would lean with the angle of the decrease.  I did some experimenting with both ways and the ssk in particular did look much nicer. It also felt like it made the seaming a bit easier (because it was easier to use the correctly slanted stitches as a guide), but I don’t think you could actually see a difference once the seaming was finished.

I was making great progress on the final triangle of the afghan, when I suddenly realized I had only a tiny amount of red yarn left and one entire red stripe (6 rows total) remaining.  Although certainly I could order another ball, the prospect of having to both wait for its arrival and also order an entire ball for only a few rows of knitting was very frustrating.  I even went so far as to dig through my stash and identify a backup skein of dark red cotton yarn that was close enough in shade to use if I ended up one or two rows short.

And then …. A Yarn Chicken Miracle.  I took the Big Cozy Cardigan to Knit Night and while pulling it out of my bag, a small ball of leftover red Brava popped out!  It was just enough remaining from a previous skein that I didn’t have to panic about having enough to finish.

On the left, what I thought I had — on the right, the miraculous extra ball.

I did need the full larger hank and a little bit of the smaller one, but I finished. (That said, if you think your gauge might be looser than mine or you just don’t want to have to stress out about it, order 5 balls of the color you pick for color 2.)

Seaming this one was a LONG process – to protect my neck and shoulder muscles, I limited myself to doing no more than one long seam and weaving in the ends along that seam per day – some days I didn’t even manage that much so it took me about a week to finish it. The stripes made it very easy to line up the edges, however, so I didn’t have to worry about keeping things even.  (A Great Crafting Mystery: Why is it that when sewing, lining up stripes makes seaming harder, but when knitting, stripes make seaming easier?)  But I really love the corner effect the feather and fan makes when it joins down those diagonal seams.

Close up of the corner detail once seamed.

I was extra motivated to finish this since the afghan will primarily be used by my husband and his birthday is in early February. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still nice to have it ready for him on time, especially since we’re going back into another bout of below freezing temps here (and our basement is COLD). He was delighted with it, and instantly wrapped it around himself while heading into a gaming session.

It does look very good on our basement sofa.

I have decided to alternate between knitting and crochet afghans so next up is my very first non arumigumi crochet project ever, the Two-Tone Square Afghan. This is already proving challenging as a novice crocheter, but we’ll talk about that in Episode 3.

Would you attempt this style of afghan?  Do you also feel like stripes make knit seams easier? Let me know in the comments!