After the Chenille Blanket III disaster, comments have advised me to (1) salvage it somehow (easy for you to say!) and (2) move on to something else, stat! I have a couple of ideas about how to salvage the halves of the chenille blanket. One is to turn them into fancy throw-pillow wraps, you know the fussy kind with decorative ties to hold them on? The other idea is to make a padded case for my Kindle. And several other people’s Kindles.
But I have moved on, also.
I started the first of these two receiving blankets the very night I slashed the chenille blanket. I used some quilt blocks that I already had on hand–in fact, the quilt blocks that had evolved from my spectacularly failed attempt to make Denyse Schmidt’s deceptively advanced Flock Of Triangles quilt in November 2007 (Denyse, seriously.) I had pulled the triangles apart from Denyse’s maddening, all-bias-seam configuration, and sewn them back together into half-triangle squares, then put the whole lot away to stew. So I had lots of half-triangle squares on hand.
I also had some receiving-blanket-sized squares of flannel on hand, left over from last winter’s hand-sewn binding frenzy. I blindly began sewing half-square triangles together, then began quilting them onto the flannel (no messing around with batting, here, which was a beautiful thing).
I have such a backlog of pieces that really need hand-sewing binding that I didn’t feel like taking the time to do it with these, so I pulled out my handy-dandy bias tape maker… which is by the way the one gadget I’ve used which stands out in my mind as being really, really, really good at what it’s supposed to do… and made bias tape and sewed it on by machine. Bada bing bada boom, a nice project that can be completed in one evening.
I highly recommend this method of finishing off a patchwork quilt top. Forgoing the batting makes life so much simpler, and honestly, using a piece of polar fleece as the backing would produce a quilt every bit as thick and warm as using low-loft cotton batting. Consider it, okay?
I’m about to try it myself.
