Blanket

embroidered with wool yarn.

A piece of filted wool! Now what to do with that? When you are bored of sewing clothes? Well well you can always make a blanket or something like that, with emroidery on!

It will be a small blanket. about 150X150 cm, because I didn´t want to cut and sew it together to get a bigger blanket. In the corners there are supposed to be embroidery. It will be quit simpel so that I will be able to use it and wash it, without hesitation, or second thoughts about using it.

NOTE! NOTE! NOTE! WASH your fabric before using! This goes for all fabric. All new fabric contains several different chemicals, not to burn so easily, to be creaseproof, and for many other reasons. And besides if it is going to shrink it will do it now.

( Once I made a dress without washing the fabric and I never made that misstake again.)

 

The first thing I realized was that, I had no chans of transfering the pattern for the emroidery with a transferpaper, to the blanket. The fabric is to fluffy and thick.

So I had to transfer with a needle and thread. I cut out the pattern in a thin piece of paper. I tucked around the edges of the drawing, with very small stiches.

When I lifted the paper (or sometimes tared it away), it looked like this.

The embroidery is a little fantasy, and a little from pictures, and from bookilluminations. The letters are filled in one color and all edges are made with stem stiches around. In the medieval time they liked all kinds of cirkles and extras so it is just to use your imagination and fantasy. I used wool yarn and a tapestry needle,( a blunt needle) Aftwer a while I had saome sort of built in fingerthimble, on my finger. I suggest that you use a reall fingerthimble instead.

 

The text?

Well it says L af T= Lovisa af Tallkotten

To mark out a straight line around the fabric I made very small stiches about 6 cm in from the edge all around the sides of the fabric, with wool yarn.
Smart as a fox ( a Swedish proverb) I decided to embroider the start of this project in one of the corners, and later on the end. I thought that it would take me the whole winter to finish it, wich it didn´t. In any case I thought that it was a fun detail.
I let my friends give me advice about the design. So it ended up with a simple but tasteful design. I had to rip of some of the embroidery, to keep it simple but tasteful.
After embroidering the whole blanket I made a small seem in each corner, because the blanket is to be folded along the edges, and the backside/ wrong side, is to be covered with linen.The linen is not to be shown on the right side.
Linen 150X150 cm was laid out on the right side, it was so big that it covered the whole blanket. I pinned it here and there so it wouldn´t move around. Remember that the blanket are supposed to be turn inside out, so you are actually working from the wrong side right now.

Before I sewed the sides togheter, I finished the embroidery

finish??/10 2004

I saved the exact date , because until everything was ready I didn´t know, and I didn´t want the embroidery to be seen at the backside, and it is easier to make a few stiches for the date than to sew everything, between the two layers of fabric.

A picture from my pinning some here and there. Just for to keep the backside in place.

The edges where ironed, because it is much easier to work with straight edges. I then sewed the fabric together. I left the corners and a piece of a longside unsewed. This because i sewed the corners by hand and turned the blanket inside out from the opened longside. It is very important to get the two fabrics plain, that is why the corners are open so you can adjust.

 

The blanket is turned inside out, and like magic you have a beatiful blanket! Now the only thing to do is to embroider the date.
As I didn´t want the backside to be shown along the edges, I tucked it to the wool in a star formation from the middle of the backside.
This is what the backside looks like.