Blanket

Earlier this summer I found out a good friend of mine from high school and her husband were expecting a baby girl! I was surprised and thrilled by the news. She is the first of my high school friends to become pregnant and I am so excited to be able to meet her daughter someday soon.

Unfortunately for me, they live on the other side of the country, but I wanted to do something for her and her baby girl. (She is expected to arrive any day now!) So I set out to make a blanket.

Now I have never made a baby blanket before. In fact my only experience with sewing outside of disastrous projects in girl scouts was to make a t-shirt quilt. (A project that took three very large rooms, days of work and not a few swear words before it was finished.) The lesson I had learned from that disaster was to keep it simple.

My plan was basically to sew two pieces of fabric together with quilting in the middle, can't get much more simple than that right?

I did a quick internet search for my usual crafting go-to's like Jo-Anne's or Michael's, but all of them were quite a significant drive away. I looked a little closer to home and found Sew Modern. It is a cute, bright little store with tons of beautiful fabric. I was nervous at first that in such a small store I would stand out as a non-craft-doer and be ridiculed by the staff. (I have issues...) But the sales people were incredibly helpful, friendly and non-judgmental. I dug deep into my brain for old crafting terms such at 'yard' 'embroidery thread' and 'batting'.

Here is what I came home with: A yard each of a pink and a pretty light green egg pattern fabric, a yard of cotton batting, and white embroidery thread. I already had on hand needles, pins and white thread from a sewing kit my mom thoughtfully put together for me when I went off to college. (Thanks mom!)

Since I got one yard of everything I didn't really have to cut anything. I just ironed the pieces before I put the two fabric pieces face to face so that the 'pretty sides' were together. (So when I turned the whole thing inside out later it would have the nice sides facing out.) Then I place the batting over both pieces and pinned three of the sides of the square. Then I got to work sewing.

Did I mention I don't own a sewing machine? I don't. So it took quite some time to get around the edge. I used a back stitch, (which I didn't know was called a back stitch until I did a quick internet search just now) all the way around on three sides and most of the way along the fourth side. It took quite a long time is far less regular and straight as a sewing machine would make, but has that cozy home-made look. Then I turned the blanket inside out.

When I turned it inside out some of the corners got bunched up with too much fabric. My solution was to turn the blanket inside out again, snip off the corner of fabric closer to where my stitches were and then turn the blanket right side out again. Problem solved. I then sewed up the hole that I had used to turn things right side out. This was by far my favorite step, because it started looking like a blanket instead of like a hairy thing with pins in it.

However, it needed something to hold all of the pieces together. Otherwise it would have that loose duvet-inside-a duvet-cover feeling instead of that secure quilt feeling. So I ironed the blanket again, and got out my white embroidery thread. (And after a quick trip back to sew modern, my embroidery needle, oops.) I marked out regular points across the quilt and sewed little knots. It turns out I was doing my own version of a "French Knot" to make little dots of white across the blanket and hold everything together.

Then I tried my shaky (and tired) hand at some real embroidery. Now I used to do cross stitching under the watchful eye of my grandmother, but I don't know if I had ever embroidered anything before. But it was important for me to add this little message to the blanket for the my friends and their new baby. I attempted a stem stich, marked out my pattern with a pencil and went to town.

I'm pretty proud of how it all turned out. While I don't think that you could possibly confuse my blanket with one bought at the store, I think that's part of it's charm. It's not-quite-square edges, weird made-up stitches and newbie embroidery show the love that went into making it. Congratulations Petra and David I'm wishing you the best. Happy Holiday's and Happy New Year!

~Claire Out