Bobbles for Baby

 A co-worker of mine is expecting (actually the baby should be here any moment now as I type this!) and her theme for the nursery is mustaches. How cute! She found some stuff on Etsy with colored mustaches and I looked it up and found the fabric for myself. Riley Blake Geekly Chic. So I used that to pick my colors. And looking through ravelry and pinterst I settled on the Blackberry Salad afghan of the Moogly Blog.

Materials ::
Yarn :: 1.5 skeins each of Lion's Brand Vanna's Choice Solids in Aqua, Fern, Sapphire, Silver Grey, Scarlett, Terracotta, White, Radiant Yellow. Scrap Black Red Heart.
Fabric :: 2 yds (used more like 1.5) Riley Blake Geekly chic white mustaches.
Other :: H Hook, yarn needle, sewing machine, white embroidery thread, size 10 cotton crochet thread, large sewing needle.

 My method for choosing the stripes was semi-random. I chose each color randomly but did not repeat a color until all eight were used first. I tried not to repeat patterns either but Aqua and Scarlett ended up next to each other several times.

 This pattern really eats up the yarn. I used roughly 1.5 skein of each color not including the border.

 

For the border I used 1 row of sc in sapphire to lock in all those ends. And boy were there a lot of them! Followed by a row of hdc in white. Then I did 4 rows of 1sc, ch1 in Fern, Radiant Yellow, Aqua, and Scarlett for a neat moss effect. 1 row of hdc in Silver Grey and Lastly a row of reverse sc in white for an awesome texture and effect.

As I was working along on this, which was super fast by the way, I timed myself at about 30 min per color, ( 8 colors repeated 6 times is about 24 hours on just the rows) I realized the back was super plain and reading on ravelry most people said the lined the back of the afghan in fabric. So I had the genius idea of actually buying the fabric on Etsy and making a lining myself - I had never lined an afghan before.

 Since I had the awesome idea of adding the mustaches to the back. I decided the front needed something too. I had previously made a mustache applique for the same friend on a coffee cozy. I decided to omit some bobble towards the end of the project to make room for it just adding straight DC in stead of bobbles. In the 6th row til the end I omitted the 2nd bobble. The 5th row to end - 3rd and 4th bobble. 4th row to end - 3rd, 4th, and 5th bobble. 3rd row to end - 4th and 5th bobble. I used white embroidering thread to make it stand out and to secure it on. At this point the afghan proper was complete.

Trying to find a tutorial online about how to sew a backing on to an afghan wasnt much help because most of them the backing lined up directly with the edge and I wanted to maintain the crochet border for the back side as well.

So I'm going to best explain how I managed to get this to work as best I can. I do want you to note that I am not the worlds best sewer and the sewing machine I used only has one type of stitch and I played with it enough to figure out how to change the size of the stitch. That sums up my experience!

First step ::  pre wash your material. It will save you tons of woes later when it shrinks. I washed this fabric in warm water by itself with a Tide color catcher sheet. Lucky for me it was colorfast.
Also, wash and block your blanket if need be. When it comes to afghans I block by putting it in the dryer solo and that's it!

Blurry cell phone picture of my work in progress.

Next, I lay the blanket on a big enough flat surface with the bobbles down. In my case, that was the wood floor. I lay my material on top of the blanket and cut the side with extra material. I also measured to be sure it would line up to the white row of the border just to be safe, but I knew with my sewing skills going on measuring alone would not be enough.

I allowed for about 1 inch on each edge to make a seam. Just a basic seam folding the material over once and once again so the edge of the material will be inside the seam.
I did one side at a time pining the edge as straight as I could using the striping of the pattern as a guide. After the first edge was sewn I pinned the material to the blanket and folded the opposite side to make that seam. And so forth. Making sure my material would cover.

For the corner I just folded over and sewed straight across. Really hope that makes sense! Here's a picture!

Then you end up with a seamed square piece of fabric. So then since I used 1/4" seam I realized that I would need some sort of guide line to actually sew the fabric to the blanket so I went back and added a longer stitch around the outer edge of the material.

Tadah! Ready for sewing. See how I have two seams. The inner most is the actual seam holding the edges in. Its also a small stitch too small to count and use. The outer is longer and a bit more manageable.

Last came the actual sewing onto the blanket. I lay the fabric on the blanket on the floor. Right side out and pinned it to place. I didn't get any pictures of the next step because I worked on it at night without any decent lighting since I was working with pins and Little Star was asleep but its really quite easy. Lets refer to this picture again :

I used sized 10 crochet thread in white and a large sharp sewing needle and did a blanket stitch all the way around the blanket. It was really quite easy. I used this Youtube Video.

 Every 4th stitch that I made with the sewing machine I made a blanket stitch. When I went through the back of the material and through the afghan I came back though the afghan just above the fabric so the preexisting border would also be seen from the fabric side. It was very secure around the edges but the center of the fabric pulled away so I used sewing thread to make little cross stitches randomly through the center of the fabric to secure the center to the afghan. I hope this all makes sense and I would be wiling to make a photo tutorial again some time if there is any interest.

Some cloudy day finished photos!