my sister, my mother, the lap blanket and i

my sister has a difficult relationship with my mother's lap blanket, a mexican serape wannabe who was given to her by an unknown nerve wrecker. my sisters take is similar to frasier's relationship with martin's chair. but my sister's not as sassy as frasier and my mother's not as good humored as martin. although the situation is really sitcom fodder real life is trickier, you get it don't you?

consequently,  after my visit last july i was determined to put my 2 pennies in the script. my take was to design a lap blanket that would be colorful enough to keep my mother happy and make her forgo the infamous serape blanket  and stylish enough so that my sister could brag about it being handmade.  

while sourcing yarns for the project my choices were narrowed to a red tex 100 wool for warp and weft and thicker wool for the color stripes. i also used a gray singles of the same grist for two wide stripes at the selvedges. that  and the use of plain weave in the stripes  resulted in a source of aggravation. however, happy to report that as a stash busting scheme it worked well.

the draft was an m's and o's  with a wide plain weave stripe on each side. at some point during the weaving i  treadled  a big segment of basket weave in the middle to speed up the construction because i was getting  bored and feared that i would end up chucking the whole project.  

having already cut the blanket off and  wet finished  it my commitment has finally ended. i  just need to do blanket stitch  around the edges.  then comes  the most difficult part,  to pack it and mail it. hope to  get it together before summer sets in!

the photos  picture the whole process. no jumping dog like eddie, though :) 

ps.
april 16th 13ºC!!!!

neki desu