A Very Special Baby Blanket

Jackie needed to weave a special blanket for a member of her family who was having her first baby.  Since the couple wanted the sex of their baby to be a surprise, the mother was requesting pastel colored items that would suit either sex. 

 

In my stash, I had a five pound cone of heavy, white cotton chenille, won as a door prize at CNCH 2007.   I offered it to Jackie to use as much as she needed for a couple of baby blankets.

 

Jackie dyed some of the chenille yellow and used a pale yellow cotton warp. 

Jackie found a blanket she wanted to use in Favorite Scandinavian Projects to Weave by Tina Ignell.  On page 94 is a Heart Blanket with Weft Loop Patterning.  Then she looked online and located a giraffe photo which she converted to a graph to make her loop pick up design, rather than the heart shown in the project. She alternated the white and yellow chenille when weaving the blanket - I believe that the border loops were yellow and the giraffe was white. Sadly for the weaving group, the baby shower had passed and all Jackie had to show was a photo of her blanket and a couple of small samples.

 

Because the book mentioned above is very expensive now, I tried to find another resource for the weft loop patterning technique.  I couldn't find anything, but if readers of this blog know of one I hope they will share it. Here is a tip; Jackie said that the weft loop patterning had to be done in short lengths at a time because wrapping over a long dowel made it next to impossible to pull out the dowel to leave the loops.  I believe she used a series of shorter dowels to make the process manageable.

 

 

What we are up to this fall

At a meeting this past August, we decided to weave scarves for teen age foster kids in our county that would be given to them as gifts during the holidays. To make it a bit more of a challenge, we set up an exchange of yarns hidden in brown paper bags. Each weaver was to use at least one of the yarns in the bag to weave one or two scarves. Using up to 50% of one's own yarn was permissable.

At the November gathering, several people were done with one or more of their scarves and some people had woven scarves for the gift giving that weren't part of the brown bag exchange. So interpersed with the show and tell from the November meeting, some of these lovely scarves will be on display here along with pertinent information on the draft, yarns used and problems encountered.

The scarf shown in this post was woven by Diana. She painted a neutral colored cotton chenille skein at a local dye workshop. The scarf was woven using the painted yarn as warp and the unpainted neutral as weft. And what a stunning, soft scarf it is. Diana washed and dried her scarf and was dismayed that the twisted fringe wormed. She did some research and found a suggestion on the web about braiding the fringes rather than twisting them -- which is the finish she settled on. We all agreed that the teenager that gets this scarf will love wearing it.

Stay tuned for more show and tell from the November meeting. I plan to keep the blog posts shorter and hopefully more interesting to our weaving readers.