Hi! Remember me? I’m the girl that used to post on here kind of frequently. Sorry I got all tangled up in everything else and let the blog slide.
A few things happened. I climbed some mountains with Ivan.
We visited family for some holidays.
We redid the floor in our den.
Also I’m pregnant, so we’ve got a little girl on the way.
I’m sure I’ll write a thing or two about the baby news soon enough (I’ve still got 4 months before she makes her official appearance). In the meantime, it’s the holiday season which, for me, means busy busy busy. I’ve got loads of custom pet portraits ordered for Christmas and tons more after the holidays as well. (I’m already up to a 2-month turnaround time on new orders, phew!)
All of that work means that I’m painting, preparing and packing 7 days a week until Christmas is over. It’s exhausting putting in so many hours and every once in a while, I just have to take an evening for myself.
A few days ago I did just that by trying out the ever-popular trend of arm knitting a chunky, jumbo blanket.
Admittedly, when I walked into Michael’s last Thursday, I only intended to glance around the party supplies and food presentation section to get ideas for my baby shower. Then I thought I’d look at the yarn… because who really needs an excuse to look at yarn? In a crate stationed smack dab in the middle of the aisle I spotted a mountain of the biggest yarn I’d ever seen — jumbo yarn.
Like everyone else, I’ve glanced around on Etsy and Amazon at those excessively plush, lusciously oversized, bouncy, dreamy, chunky, knitted blankets. And like everyone else, I’ve balked at the price. That’s not to say I didn’t think they were necessarily worth the cost. I just wasn’t ready to admit to myself that something so gloriously handmade might be a little pricier than an IKEA duvet cover.
And although the 6 skeins of yarn I balanced into a haphazard pyramid on my way to the register weren’t cheap by any means, taking on the labor of knitting the blanket myself did save me quite a bit.
Do you know what else? It was quite easy. I settled on the couch, turned on the TV to pull up a quick Youtube tutorial and got down to work. The entire thing probably only took a few hours at most. I don’t actually know the dimensions since I didn’t bother to measure the finished blanket, but I ended up using 324 yards of jumbo yarn and the blanket is enormous.
To show off the new cozy throw, I invited Banjo. She adores it. The stitches are comically big, but that helps to create an amazing cushion that Banjo couldn’t resist. It’s a bit too big to just be a dog bed, though, so I’ll have to consider what I want to do with the new blanket (other than use it for photo props, of course).
