{"id":3825,"date":"2012-06-10T09:21:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-10T14:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/?p=3825"},"modified":"2012-06-10T09:21:17","modified_gmt":"2012-06-10T14:21:17","slug":"braided-baby-blanket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/2012\/06\/braided-baby-blanket\/","title":{"rendered":"Braided Baby Blanket"},"content":{"rendered":"

My niece is having a baby. Her first. It’s a girl. Sure I could have gone to Babies R Us and bought something off her registry, but I didn’t want to do that. <\/p>\n

I’m a weaver. I wanted to weave her something. No not something, I wanted to weave her a baby blanket.
\n\"super<\/a>
\nI do have a small supply of baby blankets in my inventory, but none of them were what I wanted to send her. I wanted to make a new one.<\/p>\n

And I wanted to make a cotton one. Now, I’ve made other handwoven baby blankets from cotton, and I’ve not been overly happy with the results. I like the way they look, but I haven’t liked their softness and drape. Actually, their lack of both. <\/p>\n

\"Jillian's<\/a><\/p>\n

It was time to try again. I figured what the heck? Since it wasn’t expected, if I wove it and hated it, I could throw it away — the materials wouldn’t be too costly — and go to Babies R Us as a default. Safe enough.<\/p>\n

So I warped the Macomber loom for an 8 harness braided twill in 5\/2 cotton. White warp, pink weft, what could be simpler?
\n\"handwoven<\/a><\/p>\n

I liked the way it looked on the loom. But then again, I almost always do, so that wasn’t really meaningful.<\/p>\n

\"handwoven<\/a><\/p>\n

While I was weaving, I decided on a different course of action than my usual. Usually I weave, sew on the binding, and wet finish with a hand wash. This time I’d try another way. After all, that old saying that is if you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. Plus, I still had that throw-it-away-Babies-R-Us default option.<\/p>\n

So I took it off the loom, went upstairs to the sewing machine, sewed not one, not two, but three<\/em><\/strong> rows of machine stitching on each end, went down to the basement and tossed it in the washing machine. Then without looking at it I tossed it in the dryer. <\/p>\n

My thinking is that the cotton would shrink however much it was going to, and if the blanket was still alive when I took it out of the dryer, that was the time to sew on the polyester satin binding.<\/p>\n

Well, I took it out of the dryer and LOVED it! It was soft and sweet, not a bit of stiffness left in it!<\/p>\n

\"finished<\/a>
\nWent back upstairs to the sewing machine, sewed on the binding, shot a few pix, and sent it off to baby.<\/p>\n

I will definitely do this again. And will probably use the washer to wet finish all my cottons from now on. I’ll still hand wash all my rayons and bamboos, though. <\/p>\n

I have so much to learn. That’s one of the things I love about weaving. As soon as I have one thing mastered, there are a dozen others waiting for me.<\/p>\n

Back to the loom!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My niece is having a baby. Her first. It’s a girl. Sure I could have gone to Babies R Us and bought something off her registry, but I didn’t want to do that. <\/p>\n

I’m a weaver. I wanted to weave her something. No not something, I wanted to weave her a baby blanket. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[27,530],"class_list":["post-3825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weaving","tag-baby-blanket","tag-cotton","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3825"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3834,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825\/revisions\/3834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}