It's getting way too hard to do "tini _____" for every post, so I'm giving up on it. I figure if it's too hard now I should just give it up before it's too well established. Also, I have some pretty serious posts coming up and I just feel awkward using titles with "tini" in them, I don't know why.
Anyhow, today I
FINALLY get to post about the blanket I made for Emily! It's been finished since, oh, October, and I originally planned to give it to her as a birthday present, but then it morphed into a birthday/Christmas present of sorts, and since she didn't know what it was, I couldn't post the stuff until I actually gave it to her. Which was on Saturday -- but then Christmas junk happened (I'm sorry, that sound so bah-humbug: HO HO HO, okay!) so now it's Christmas night (this might not get posted until Boxing Day morning) and I'm finally in bed in the dark getting around to this. This is about to be
reaaaallllyyy picture heavy, so I apologize.
This is the finished product. It's a 100% Cotton blanket (made with random odds and ends of Sugar'n'Cream yarn from other blankets) which was based off of
this blanket. I think it's a really nice light weight blanket, but that's not really what this is about. It's really about how the heck I put her name on it.
I started out with a handwritten sheet with her name on it. If your handwriting isn't so neat, or you don't have the patience to write it out a good 6 or 7 times like I did (until it was perfect, obviously... though this turned out to be a huge waste of time), you could print off the name in a pretty but simple font. You don't want anything too fancy because you have to be able to trace it with little stitches, so just be careful, you feel me? Anyway, then I poked little holes all along the letters to use like one of those "learn to sew" kits for little kids, positioned the paper on the blanket, and started sewing in and out using the same cotton yarn in a contrasting color.
The best way I can describe to you how I sewed the letters is like the lochness monster. At first it'll look like your letters with gaps between each stitch, but you'll go back through and fill them in. I went through and when I got to the end of a letter I turned around and made nessy's bumps go the other way (so wherever had been up was now down and vice versa).
I ended up giving up pretty quickly on my chart because it was causing me more inconvenience than it was helping me. I have a pretty good eye and pretty neat writing, so I freehanded the rest of the letters.
This is what I ended up with after 1 time through, but I was really unhappy with it, because without the flash and from far away, it didn't stand out enough.
I went through a second time, which still wasn't enough, so it progressed to a third time, which I was finally happy with.
Since I did the second and third time through separately, I ended up with a lot of ends to sew in. I made another blanket for my neighbor and did each letter using a single strand for all 3 resews, and that got rid of a lot of the inconvenience of sewing it in. I definitely recommend doing it that way.
Obviously, you could sew in the ends the same way you do when you have a color change on your blanket (if you've never done that, I recommend
this tutorial), but I didn't want the blue to spread all around the back of the blanket, so I weaved the extra yarn in and out through the back of the letters and then trimmed it. I found this also made the letters sturdier and they stood out a little better.
I'm really happy with how the blanket came out, and like I mentioned, I made another one for a neighbor who saw Emily's at my house one day and insisted she needed a blanket with her name on it. I think the name really adds a nice personal touch to a pretty simple blanket, especially if you're giving it as a gift.
It's still Christmas, so merry Christmas to all of you! So excited to do some more posting in the next week or so.
xx, kristina
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