The Great American Aran Afghan booklet features 24 squares by twenty-four knitters. Combine 20 squares of your choice for the throw and pair the additional four into accent pillows. All the information you'll need to knit The Great American Aran Afghan is included in this convenient booklet.

Whether they are called blankets or throws, warm and colorful afghans are an ever popular item for the home and project for knitters, and this guide takes knitters from the basics of creating afghan squares through the mechanics of laying out those squares in a design to the final product. Four project patterns—two that combine texture and color, one with cables, and one for kids—are included. Step-by-step illustrations are featured for stitches such as intarsia, duplicate stitch, cable and twist stitches, modular, entrelac, and two-color stranding. Both written and charted pattern directions, finishing hints, and border treatments are also provided. Since squares are made one at a time, crafters can easily transport projects and switch up designs any time.

KNITTING. Straight from the pages of Knitter's Magazine: the second in a marvellous series, done in a brand new colourway. 24 new squares by 24 great designers in a flower garden of color, motifs, and patterning. You could decide to knit your afghan by repeating several of your favorite squares, or even by making it with just one or two squares. Refer to Knitter's School illustrations to assist you in learning new techniques. All the information you'll need to knit The Great North American Afghan are in this convenient booklet.

Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age. Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the “Great Game” of European powers and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.” In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.

"Since its first appearance in Knitter's Magazine issues 42-46, the Great American Afghan has appealed to many knitters - especially first time afghan knitters, even othose who thought they would never knit an afghan. The secret of its success is the square. You'll explore a broad range of knitting techniques, one square at a time"--Pg. 3.

A sharp and arresting people's-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city's prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked—by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers—always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own.

Provides patterns and instructions for a variety of afghans, including picture afghans, and demonstrates basic stitches