June 1, 2015

Heart Scrapghan

A good friend sent me a cute picture of a blanket on Pintrest. I quickly hunted down the pattern on Ravelry and took the job of making her one. The Little Heart Scrapghan by Julie Lapalme is a great leftover yarn consumer. The pattern costs $4.00.

I went though my stash and pulled out leftovers of 24 different colors. My goal was to make three hearts in each color I had, to give a good variety and reach the 72 heart motifs needed. I made the first heart as written and as others mentioned on Ravelry, did not like the holes it left in the center. So I used some of suggestions in the comments to modify the heart pattern. I made the color parts first of each and every one first. At about 25 minutes per heart x 72 of them, thats about 30 hours for the colored parts alone, but I spread it out over a two weeks by setting a goal of making 6 hearts a day.

72 colored hearts
Once done with the colors I got a big pound ball of white by Loops and Threads to make all the borders on each. Adding a border to a heart took about 10 minutes a piece (x72 = 12 hours) Before I started the first border, I laid out all the hearts in columns as I would want them to be when done. This is because rather than sewing them all together when done, I was hoping to attach them in columns as I went along. Then I would only have to sew up the columns into the blanket rather than every single one...

I could have kept reworking this layout all day...

Unfortunately trying to connect as I went along did not work. The seam it made was very uneven and that would have made for a very bumpy blanket, so I followed the instructions to leave a tail to sew them together with. It was a bit painstaking and linking up just the rows of 12 to each other took about 2 hours each (x 6 rows = 12 hours). Laying them out like this was important though to make sure the finished blanket would look nice.
All columns complete and ready for attaching.
Once the long strips are done you then sew those up in a kind of offset pattern. This was even more painstaking, but it helped a great deal to lay them out flat on the table while sewing up. In order to not have a billion ends to weave in, I cut long pieces of yarn about 1.5x the length of the column of hearts and sewed at the points where directed and then wove through the edging to the next connection point. That way I only had to bind off and hide the ends at the top and bottom. Sewing the strips together took another 3 hours. Once all the strips had been connected, I was finally done!

Detail shot of columns sewn together.
The finished blanket measures: 5 feet long by 45 inches wide.

I love how it looks. Since it has some holes between the motifs it isn't super-duper warm, but still does a good job of being snuggly. I also love that what was once two bags of yarn leftovers is now less than half a bag of small balls of yarn. These tiny scraps aren't enough for anything else really, but since I do amigurumi toys you never know when you'll need a little bit of a color for embroidery details.
Finished!
Total time to complete this blanket was about 60 hours.
Difficulty: Medium... no part is particularly hard, it's just a lot of work.