Making a blanket out of pashmina scarves

$25 and some street haggling later,
 I have a throw blanket

Our current apartment is very small. It is approximately 450 square feet. As we were packing to move I realized that for the space to feel orderly and clean, it would have to be well organized and coordinated in terms of both shape of items and their color.

We decided to buy some new furniture to fit the space. I went on the hunt for the perfect throw blanket for the living room couch. I knew that I wanted the blanket to be predominately white and turquoise, without a lot of intricate patterning. This turned out to be a fruitless search, as the gods of West elm, CB2, Target etc. all seemed to conspire to be really into gray and yellow at the time I started the hunt. This is when I decided to make my own blanket.


As our move coincided with the last three months of my pregnancy, grant season and a major publication project, I knew I didn't have a lot of time to quilt or knit a blanket. Moreover, I had just seen the perfect turquoise color on the streets of NYC - a "pashmina" scarf being sold by a table vendor. Fake pashminas  pepper Manhattan. They are sold by every street vendor in the city, for about $5 a piece. That's when I decided to make a throw blanket out of pashmina scarves.

My street shopping bounty 

I picked up two turquoise scarves with white scarf for contrast,  and then more or less followed the blanket-making instructions I found at Centsational Girl. I made a few adjustments, mentioned below. The blanket is basically a striped duvet cover that sewn directly over a piece of quilt batting. The total cost of this project is $25-$35 - $15 for the scarves, and $10 or $20 depending on whether you want polyester or cotton batting.

Cut the scarf into strips and pin the first
 two strips together

Three scarves will make a blanket about the size of a twin coverlet. The first step to make a striped blanket is to cut the scarves in half, lengthwise. The scarf strips will, eventually, be assembled and sewn in two groups of three. The two sewn groups are then sewn together. To start, pin two of the lengths together, right side in, and sew them with a straight stitch. Since the scarves fray, I found it helpful to give myself a little bit more than the standard 1/4 seam allowance. I left about 1/2 inch of allowance.

It is helpful to leave a 1/2 inch seam allowance

To this pair of sewn strips, add and pin the third strip and sew. Repeat this entire process a second time to make a second sewn panel of three strips. Then assemble the two panels, right side in, pin and sew along the two long sides and one short side. Leave one short side open. Turn the newly assembled blanket cover right side out and carefully line up with the quilt batting and temporarily pin it in place. Us as few pins as possible, as these scarves sort of lack a self-healing ability. The holes left by the pins might be apparent.

 It's possible, due to differences in scarf, seam allowances and batting widths that the cover will be slightly smaller than the batting. At this point, the batting can be trimmed if needed. I found that the batting needed to be trimmed, though Centsational Girl seemed to get her batting to slip in effortlessly - no lining up, no trimming.

No pic of the lining up process, sorry. 

After trimming the batting,  it's a simple matter of guiding the batting into the gigantic duvet cover just sewn and straightening it so that the batting corners fit into the cover corners. Once the batting is in place at the corners, I stitched the batting to the cover in a few places, along the fringe of the scarves. I don't have pictures of this process because in the tiny apartment in which I assembled this blanket, I had to slip the batting and then hang the blanket across a door and a few other structures to complete this task. Presumably, you have a more spacious apartment and won't have to spread you blanket across two separate rooms to get the batting into place.

hand stitch the open side of the cover
and you are done!

Once the batting is in place, be sure to lay the blanket flat, smooth the cover and batting and pin the open end to the batting in a handful of places. Hand stitch the open end of the blanket closed using a slip stitch, or whatever stitch rocks your world. Centsational Girl likes colorful and apparent stitches so she used very colorful thread. I prefer less apparent stitching, so I used a more subtle color.

The finished product in its usual place. 

Three final thoughts on this project. 1) I love the blanket (it is super warm), but would have liked it to be a bit more square. If I were to redo this project I would resize the batting 2) the blanket actually holds up really well. It has collected a few snags from heavy use, but that's hardly a problem. 3) I really like this project because when the cover eventually gives out or I grow tired of the colours, the batting can be used again and again.

Scratch and win pregnancy announcements

The itty bitty, teeny weeny, faintest of lines

that changed everything

Photo credit: me

A few weeks after I deposited my dissertation, H and I decided to revisit our plan to have children. We were very quiet about trying to get pregnant, discussing the possibility with no one but my doctor.

We weren't private for long, because 10 days after we decided to try I found myself holding the plastic wand pictured above.  Unabashedly excited about this child, I decided to come up with a playful way to tell my parents the news.

Around 13 weeks, we decided to make scratch and win tickets by following these instructions. Basically, I designed a game-like card and printed it on cardstock. I made mine in powerpoint, saved it as a tif and printed it on our colour inkejet printer at home.

Now to make it a scratch card. Martha Stewart's tutorial suggested painting the circles with a mix of liquid acrylic paint and dish detergent. The trick to making the card easy to scratch is to first cover the areas to be scratched with clear packing tape before painting.  If you just paint the card, you'll have gooey paint on a card that will not scratch off.

Stick a stretch of packing tape to wax paper. The wax paper acts as the sticker backing. Cut the tape to the appropriate shape, peel the wax paper off and stick your packing tape sticker to the space you want to your recipient to scratch.

Then mix your liquid acrylic paint with a drop of dish detergent and paint over the tape. Let it dry and voila, a scratch and win card.

If I could go back I think I would have worded the card "November 23rd, 2012 is my due date". As I worded it my parents discovered I was pregnant when they scratched the first circle, leaving the the last two circles to be scratched after congratulations  and hugs etc.. All of that said, it was an easy project. My parents loved it and it introduced our little one in a fun and lighthearted way.

January Poverty - I'm gonna make my own laptop sleeve

Like most doctoral students forced to make a living at teaching while doing research, January is a lean month for me. My institution is notorious for paying staff late. I often wait 3 or more pay periods before I am paid. Those weeks between the last of the Fall term paycheques and the first of the Spring term money are tough. I am sitting here with holes in mismatched socks. The thought of another lunch of Wasa crackers is making me nauseous.

Not much to be done but suffer the slings of the crock-pot and arrows of cable providers intent on re-framing the basic cable package to coincide with confusion about the analog to digital migration. I'm broke. The sort of person I am, I refuse to dip into savings or credit cards to get by during this period. I've made a polite phone call to con-ed and my phone provider to explain my current situation and now I sit and wait.

...so what is a fabulous person to do while flat broke and working like a dog? Well, I fantasize about what I might buy when I have money. Currently, I am fantasizing about the laptop sleeve I need. My fantasies led me to www.etsy.com - a web site dedicated to the sale of homemade items...laptop sleeves included. There, I found these pretty little things






Then I thought "screw this"....I can totally make my own. Here are two websites with free patterns and instructions for lap top sleeve construction. The first lists instructions for a sleeve with handles.

The second provides instructions for an envelope-style bag.

It helps to have a sewing machine, but I have made similar items in the past by hand stitch. The main difference between the two methods, in the case of these sleeves, is really the amount of time you want to invest. That said - I have time. I am broke and losing tv stations.....I can probably pull this together in a night with the scrap fabric I have lying around from other projects.