I'm not in love...



Could do with a press...

 Sorting out the blanket box this weekend, I uncovered a baby afghan I made last year.

I’m not in love with it. For a start, the boygoblin is over a year old now, and that’s older than I thought it was when I began. Even at six months he was a little too old for pastel gingham bears. *sigh.

Finishing  the cross stitch was faff enough. I remember working on it at the height of summer - the one week we got – when sitting under a blanket was not my favourite thing.


bear escaping (don't blame him...)

 And I’m not particularly enjoying the flannel either. Taken with the chunky cross-stitch it makes the thing look clunky, rather than cosy.



chunky clunky

 For the quilting, I found a variegated thread that picks up all the colours in the embroidery, and went for a sketchy tartan type of quilting , running along each edge of the woven borders. Sketchy because I patently cannot sew in a straight line.

My mother would call the sketchy quilting a "design feature" (aka rescue job)

I bound by hand. Why? Because I’m slap-dash. The edges of my quilting lines were messy, so I needed to cover them over both front and back. And I got impatient over the iron (again, not the wisest project to undertake on a midsummer night) so the binding’s all wonky and I just couldn’t see how I was going to wrangle it in place by machine. If this thing had any chance of not being a complete dogs breakfast it needed its binding to be gently and sensitively eased into place.

Besides, I fancied a bit of CSI…



Wobbly binding (cute flannel)

So here we are – a baby blanket that is too small for darling goblin, and too ugly to inflict on any other child. I’m just, only just, too invested in the thing to throw it away. I’ll pop it back into his blanket box and wait a few more months…