I was recently commissioned to make a unique baby afghan. The recipient has opted not to know the sex of the baby before he/she is born. You don’t hear that too much these days. To top it off, the parents-to-be have shunned traditional unisex baby colors like green, yellow, or even purple and decided to use a palette of various shades of beige in the nursery. Thus my assignment was to make a beige baby afghan.

Beige is not a real popular yarn color as it is, but boy, try to find it in baby yarn. There is plenty of white or even off white, but beige, nada! Now if you want wool, then that’s easy to find in beige, but some babies are allergic to wool, so that was not an option. Finally, I narrowed it down to two yarns, Lion Brand’s Organic Cotton in macadamia or Cotton-Ease in either sand, almond, or taupe. The client opted for the organic cotton, which color-wise I tended to agree that it was more on the beige side.

So I ordered the yarn and went to work. It was really coming out well, and though I have to use an aluminum hooks instead of my beloved bamboo, I really like working with this yarn. It has a textured look to it, and it is so, so soft! I was nearing the end when stupid me decided to read the yarn label only to discover…yikes..it says “hand wash and lay flat to dry!” Oh, the horror! I mean…who is going to want to hand wash a baby afghan?

As my freak-out session continued, I urgently post on the Ravelry boards for help. My hope was that someone had washed this yarn in the washing machine before. While I never found anyone who had done that, a few replies suggested I make some swatches and run them through various machine cycles to see how they did. And that is exactly what I did.

I washed both in the hand-wash cycle of my washer. Then one swatch I partially dried in the dryer with other clothes, and the other swatch I lay flat to dry. To my relief, both turned out fine. In fact, I expected to see some noticeable shrinkage, but that didn’t happen either. Once I finish the afghan, I plan to use the hand-wash cycle, run it very briefly on a low setting in the dryer, and then lay it flat to finish drying. Since I live in such a humid climate, this thing will never dry if I don’t get it at least started. Hopefully, the entire piece will survive just as well as the swatches did.