mama-of-purl

Okay, I have a thing about blankets. Every time I go to IKEA, I have to restrain myself from buying more blankets. Not that I needed any more. 

Last time I almost picked up a thin knit stripey blanket for Johanna, but I thought: hey, I can make a blanket myself!

That same night, I picked the colors and started cutting out the squares for a little quilt. Three nights later, it was finished. So the last blanket took about 13 years to get finished, this one only took about 13 hours. Talk about improvement!

The contrasts could have been placed better, and I'd planned different positions of the back colors, but I'm really fond of this blankie. 

For the batting, I used an unconventional material- one of these super cheap smaller fleece plaids they sell at IKEA. It's called IRMA and I got in on sale for about 1,50€. The only weird thing is that I basically made a blanket out of an already functioning blanket.

Aaah, I'm almost done with the gift marathon... I made the wedding pillow last night, as well as some cute brooches for Johanna's daycare teachers. Despite the last minute presents stress, I couldn't keep myself from starting a much-needed new hat pour moi, when I had Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitters Almanac in the mail yesterday. 

Alright, I gotta wrap some gifts and write a few cards now, then we're off for the holidays this afternoon.

Hope you all have a great time with your families, PEACE Julia

Wow, I finally finished this blanket last night- this project has been in my head for 13 years and parts of the fabric have been sitting in boxes for just as long, moving to different apartments and all.

The fabric I used for the outer squares was bought in Denmark ca. 1993, when my family made an annual trip to Aarhus on a national holiday Germany stopped having shortly afterwards... I wanted to make a patchwork blanket/quilt but had no sewing experience and a lack of impatience when dealing with my mom's stubborn sewing machine, therefore the more than a decade long hibernation of the lovely fabric squares.

The plaid green fabric is a recycled shirt I wore to shreds which ended up having a hundred different shades having been bleached from the sun on several hitch-hiking trips, and the center piece is from a T-Shirt I bought in Kansas City in 1994, unfortunately in XL, so I only wore it at night. It was such a cool shirt with a glow in the dark milky way, I figured that'd be nice on a bedspread. Oh, and there's a floral pattern sand-colored fabric that used to be a pillow cover I got from an ex-boyfriend. The rest is IKEA fabric. I kind of pieced it all together as I went along, no planning,  just sewing;-) THat's why the center piece is not quite rectangular, but it all works out alright...

Man, I like this blanket.

So here's a picture of wavy before I washed it and one of how freakin' dirty the water was;-) I rinsed it 4 times!

My mother came over today and gave her expert opinion on why the pattern didn't come out as nice as I hoped: I should've used a lager size pair of needles. The yarn really poufed up after washing, so it's a little tight:-( Sorry, still no picture of how it came out, I'm still a little too disappointed...

I'm simply going to have to knit another one of these. Noro Kureyon sounds tempting enough to make me want to actually start over again.

Last night I sewed a little gift for one of Johanna's kindergarten friends who turns 2 tomorrow. She's totally adorable and I thought she should have something special, this cutesy purse: