if you were Alison...

would this be your blanket?

This is my proposal for an arrangement of the colors we've been choosing over the last several months. Alison keeps saying she needs to see it all laid out before she can say whether she agrees to my proposal. These are not sewn together, and in fact, the dark blue squares are still rectangles; they've just been folded in half to get a picture of how they might look in the finished blanket.
So what do you think? Would you go for this arrangement? Or tweak it slightly? Or come up with something completely different?

Tell me what you think! Tell Alison what you think!

the blanket project continues

Intrepid friends Alison and AK braved a snow storm this weekend to enjoy pancakes and continue work on the reclaimed felted sweaters patchwork blanket. First we cut the felted sweaters apart at the seams, resulting in a colorful pile of seams:
(I know, doesn't this look knittable? Into rugs, maybe? Too bad I didn't think of it until I'd already tossed almost all of it out. Next time.) Fortunately, our work also yielded a pile of cut apart sweaters, which Alison proceeded to lay out on the floor, picking and choosing until she had just the colors she wanted in her blanket.
After she'd decided which colors would become her blanket and which would become part of my felted sweater stash, we started cutting them into rectangles, 4 inches by 8 inches. We did this the old-fashioned way, with pattern pieces, pins, and scissors.

And we cut, and cut, and cut. After a while, Alison discovered that it was just as precise to cut the rectangles without pins, holding the pattern piece flat to the fabric, which made it little easier, but it still took f o r e v e r, hours, after which we quit and took the families out to dinner because we were utterly whipped, and still we had a formidable pile of fabric to render into rectangles.

At which point I said, you know, this would be so much easier with a rotary cutter. Now, I didn't really know if it actually would be easier with a rotary cutter, but I thought so. I'd never used one, but I knew that people who do a lot of precision cutting of small pieces use them, and so it seemed a likely lead.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, I did a little online research and discovered that rotary cutters are not terribly expensive. I already had a cutting mat and several metal rulers, so I dug out my coupon for my local big-box craft store (Jo-Ann's, which used to be a fabric store. Sigh.) and got myself down there. After exhaustively perusing the choices, I settled on this:
It's a Fiskars, 60 mm. For a short time, things went swimmingly. I was rendering rectangles at a dizzying rate. My rectangles had precision and speed. They were charming. I loved my new toy.

And then I sliced off the tip of my left index finger. Much bleeding ensued. Band-Aids were applied. A phone call to a doctor friend revealed that all I could really do was lay low and apply pressure until the bleeding stopped. I bled on my new favorite Salvation Army found sweater. Joe rinsed it out. I became pathetic. Joe sat by me. (He's a good one. We'll be keeping him.) And then, finally, the bleeding stopped.

This morning, I find that it is sort of relaxing to have a minor injury. I am more mindful as I go around the house, because I have to wonder which of my usual things I can do, and which I can't. Shower? No. Bath? Yes. Wipe down the table? Yes. Wash the dishes? No. Prepare Big's math work for the day? Yes. Read to Little? Yes, but it turns out that my tiny but constant discomfort makes me not quite patient enough for yet another round with Where's Waldo.

Thankfully, I am still able to knit. The Shetland Triangle is finished and needs blocking. Like all unblocked lace, it is a strange and shriveled thing. Blocking lace is the magical opposite of felting. Pictures of the properly blocked shawl to come.

Alison's blanket

Remember the blanket from our very first post? It was called Elsie and Joe Get Things Done, and it's from April 06. I can't seem to link to it, so if you're interested, you'll have to go look. It's a blanket that I sewed together by machine from rectangles cut from felted sweaters. We got these sweaters for free, and some of them were pre-felted for us. My friend Alison took a liking to this blanket, and I agreed to make another one.

She and I have been trolling local Salvation Army stores for months now, looking for the right combination of colors. Sometimes we find the sweaters already felted, which is a good sign that they will felt well. Other times we've bought sweaters nobody else is likely to buy, because they have great gaping holes or stains.

And we have even bought perfectly good sweaters, with the sole intention of shrinking them and cutting them apart. We think we have almost enough now. Here is a rough mock-up of what the blanket might begin to look like. The sweaters are laid out on my lawn, to get an idea of how much contrast we have and how much we need.


We think we need more red, and a nice grassy green would be nice. Let me know if you have any old sweaters you'd like to donate to Alison's blanket.

The giant ball of yarn is getting smaller. This is a swatch:
I have officially run out of blue yarn for my mittens:
And no, I don't have anything that comes close to matching this yarn. I'm afraid the thumb is going to be either gray or green Lopi. You can see why this project has stalled out.