Fusion blanket

Relief.  This blanket has been months in the making. I am just so glad to have finished it. Kismet may have been at play; I had just enough blue yarn to blanket stitch and crochet borders around the fabric squares and stitch them all together.

This one was my interpretation of a blanket made by And the Little Dog Laughed.  Where the profit margin is in that blanket, I'll never know. Truly, the asking price is worth it for amount of time it would have taken to make alone, let's not even mention the cost of materials.

I started making my crochet blanket using a bobble stitch. It took me nearly two weeks to get the central colours to the size they are, and because of the blanket's slow progress, I lost interest in it, and put it away. Bad mistake. When I pulled it out again, I could not remember how to make the stitch so instead of a bobble, I ended up with a flat weave on the pink and grey borders.  I didn't mind how the combination looked, so I chose to continue with it.  You can view it in its unfinished state here.

Then it was time to work on the fabric squares. Selecting the fabric was easy. I love Aneela Hoey's collections, I used her Little Apples fabric in my quilt and when her Walk in the Woods line became available, I bought some charm squares. At the time, I had no project in mind for them, but this blanket seemed the obvious choice. The colours complement the yarn and give the blanket the snuggly, wintery feel that I was looking for.

Sewing the blocks together was not difficult, just time-consuming as I handstitched the openings closed.  I guess if I had thought it through, I could have made the seam allowances bigger and then machine topstitched the openings down once I had turned the squares out the right way. You should know me by now, I like to make things harder than they need to be.

Using my wool needle, I blanket stitched around the outside of each block in 1cm increments. They probably could have been spaced further apart. Then I packed them all away and didn't touch them for over a month. I guess I was struggling with how I was going to attach them to the blanket.

Somehow, and I can't believe it happened, the number of stitches I used and the v-stitches I crocheted seemed to work out and putting them all together was actually easy in the end. It took 13 hours to crochet the fabric squares to the edge of the main blanket using a flat-braid technique.

There are fusion blanket tutorials out there, and I think if anyone is considering making one for the first time, it would be wise to refer to them, if only for the sake of your sanity - unless you are like me and unwittingly embark on projects without a pattern because you are blissfully unaware of the potential difficulties.  That's always fun, and is, I guess, by definition, crafting dangerously.

Degree of difficulty: It was pure luck that this blanket came together relatively easily. This was a true sliding doors project - if I had chosen a different stitch to attach the fabric squares, made the fabric squares smaller, or even made the main crochet blanket any size other than what it ended up being, it could have resulted in a very large headache.
Time taken: Two months
Result: You would think that because this blanket combines both yarn and fabric, two of my most favourite-est things in the world, I would be thrilled with it. However, that tired, smug-looking child (but mostly tired) in the photo above was how I felt by the end of this project.

Linking up with Show and Tell and My Creative Space this week.