Dog Blanket: One Down

With as simple as these blankets are to assemble I should’ve gotten both finished. However, unforeseen circumstances required my attention to be spent elsewhere.

I started work on the fronts the day before, but then Chevy’s Happy Hour called and, well, we all know who is going to win in that scenario. So yesterday morning I took to finishing the two small blankets, one for each cushion on our piece of crap La-Z-Boy reclining sofa which, while sewing, I noticed the back had fallen out of place again. To give you a better idea of what I am talking about, let’s pretend like you are sitting on the sofa and decide to recline, so you pull the handle and just as you are starting to relax one whole side of the back falls off and traps you between the arm rest and back and if you’re really lucky you manage to avoid hitting your head on the hardwood floor. Anyway, so while I was sewing my partner gets a call that friends of ours need us to babysit while they pick out all the stuff they need for the contractors to work on the house they are purchasing before they move in. Jealous? Maybe a little.

I’m not saying that this particular little boy is a handful, because honestly he’s probably the easiest kid to watch, but our house is not at all child friendly. I mean, if he were to walk into the kitchen I’d have to put away the various knives just sitting out waiting to be washed. If he walks up to the sewing machine I have to be careful he doesn’t grab any of the three scissors or containers of sewing pins and impale himself and/or others. If he walks into the office to get another movie (his favorite thing to do by far… every ten minutes) I have to walk back there to make sure he doesn’t climb the shelves holding the DVDs. And to further show just how unchildfriendly our home is, we keep all the toys in the garage… behind chicken feed… next to saws (which would be his second favorite place to go in between walking to the office to stare at our DVD collection.)

Needless to say, once he arrived I didn’t get much else done. Oh, I could’ve cleaned up the place, but then I’d have to pull half of it out in order to use it again once he left. So alas, I was able to get one dog blanket done and the other is completely ready for quilting, with the top pieced together and the back piece of fleece cut to size. The quilting portion of this went by pretty smoothly, being a small piece. I decided on a simple stitch to enforce the piece stitching and quilted where I pressed the seams. Most sturdy quilts I’ve seen are done this way. Besides, it is a dog blanket, and more than likely Lucy will destroy it by being, uh, her. Hopefully it will last the summer, or at the very least, the few days my partner’s mom and sister are in town!