Crossing Borders - Peter Max Afghan

Ever since I made the Yellow Submarine afghan,





I've been wanting to make a Peter Max afghan as well.

Although Peter Max had nothing to do with the making of the Yellow Sub, his style and wonderful pop-art, day-glo colors and vision must surely have been influenced by the film, (or is it the other way around??!) LOL!!!!

Anyway, I was googling around looking for one of Peter Max's paintings that I knew I could try to reproduce in crochet form.

I fell in love with this painting titled "Crossing Borders" that, from what I've read on the web, here was created in the 1980s and flanked both sides of the border crossing of the El Paso Stanton Street Bridge. I hope I've got that right. There wasn't much I could find on it. Not even a really good full shot of the picture.

So I used the photograph of the picture in the link above, uploaded it to photobucket, used the editing features to "fill out" and try to "straighten" the photo.

This is what I came up with...





A before and after of the photograph I used. (Click on the photos to enlarge them).

Then I uploaded it to microrevolt's Knitpro and made a graph of it to crochet.

Without further ado, here's my afghan. My tribute to the fabulous artist Peter Max....





My camera kept wanting to use the flash so I held it down in the first shot so there's no flash, and in the second shot I let the flash go off.

The afghan is 60 inches wide by 41 inches tall. This includes the wide border I put on it.

For the most part it is Hobby Lobby's "I Love This Yarn" brand but there is also a lot of Red Heart yarn too.

It is tunisian crocheted, (that's the afghan stitch), using a size J cabled crochet hook.

There are two colors of gold in the hair, you're not imagining it. If you notice the original photo, the gold color varies dark to light so I wanted to try and capture that on the blanket too. It starts dark gold to light to dark and again to light beneath the face. He's also a turquoise color rather than the blues.

Since I had to fudge with the bottom, I decided to make that a large Peter Max logo instead of the tiny one on the original.





I took a lot of photos of the afghan but they mostly look the same. It's hard to stand on a bench and hold the camera up high enough to get the whole thing in the shot.

For the city, I crocheted it from the graph first, and afterwards, I used black Sinphonia yarn and stitched in the building windows and outlines with a yarn needle.





Here's the last two shots. One of the front and then I flipped over the afghan to photograph the back too. I know a lot of you crocheters out there always want to see the backs. :o)

I hope you all enjoy looking at this, it was a lot of fun to make.
Peter Max is an amazing artist and I hope he wouldn't mind my attempt at reproducing his work in yarn form.
Max Rocks!!!