The Blanket

Sometimes I surprise myself when things that I perceive to be taking forever suddenly get done before I realize it. Part of it I think is that I often work in small spurts. When my kids were young, I often didn't have a long stretch in which to work on projects. I learned that by giving a project your whole attention for only 15 or 20 minutes at a time, one can make real progress. That is what I think happened with the blanket. In small spurts, it got woven, off the loom and wet finished in really good time. Of course the centre seam and the hemming took hours and hours. I was totally tired of iffy home decorating shows with designers making ugly "art" from felt cut outs and leaf prints, CSI and cooking show reruns - Why do they only play the same 6 episdoes I've seen, over and over? The centre seam was done by picking up the weft threads on one side, then the other, back and forth, running an "extra" warp thread through to connect them all. Nearly invisible except for the fact that the alternating striped pattern caused a small pink line on oneside and a brown one on the other.

The yarn is labelled "mouton" - so wool and I think is 6/2. It's very soft and I had absolutely no choice of colours as it was a stash sale - so it was brown, grey or pink. The grey wasn't enough contrast for the pink and didn't look right with the brown. The brown and pink might not be my first choice in colour design, but it looks amazingly nice together. My son has told me that it is "red" and that he thinks he should have it. I take that as a compliment.