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
