Maitland blanket shawl.

We did a Jelssievision on Saturday morning and then I went to Maitland on the train. Maitland was relaxing and productive. I shall list below.

• Spotlight with mum to buy new curtains, and I bought some fleece for a wearable blanket for my fridged office.
• Tax with Dad.
• Mum cut my hair.
• Brother came out for lunch at Billabongs.
• Church.
• Cut out my wearable blanket using mums as a pattern.
• Read.
• Went to garden nursery with mum and bought plants (I got lemongrass and mint), did gardening.
• No snacking.
• Caught train home, the 4.15 from Morisset on Monday. It took 2 hours to get to Central, which would have been well quicker than the F3 because we actually hit that traffic at the Morisset exit. A 17km traffic jam apparently.
• Did some grocery shopping for the week ahead, and broke my no takeaway rule. You gotta know when to break a rule.
• Sewed my blanket shawl!

Only complaint is my body got all weird and achy on the train ride up on Saturday so that was super uncomfortable, and it hung around on and off, I think I'm still achy today actually but I've also got some sore Jillian muscles so I cant tell where one ends and the other starts. But it's like how your body feels when you have the flu, but only from the waist down. Achy back and legs.

I saw my cross stitch framed! It looks very amazing. I couldn't bring it home on the train. But I took a photo on my ipad.

How to make a blanket shawl.

Buy some fleece. It is usually about 150cm wide, so buy 1.5m of it so that you have a square. Buy 1.5m of 2 colours that go together nicely. Or 3 metres of one colour. Or if you want the cheaters version, just 1.5 of one colour. I went with dark navy and a medium brown. I spent $22.

I used my mums shawl as a pattern to cut around because she'd done all the hard work, but the idea is, cut the fleece (both pieces) into a square. Then cut about a 90cm square out of one corner of the square so you have an L shape (layer the two pieces on top of each other to make sure they are the same). HINT: round the corner so it sits comfortably around your neck. Use a dinner plate to draw the round corner.

If you're doing the cheat version, once you have one L shape you are finished. You have a blanket shawl to wear. But the reason not to do the cheat version is, fleece will curl around the edges. So keep going.

Put your two fleece Ls together with the fluffy sides facing. Pin them. Sew around the edges but leave about a 20cm gap somewhere. Then turn your L inside out through that gap, and now you have an L which is fluffy on both sides. Handsew the gap closed. 

The last step is just to finish it a bit nicely, top-stitch all the way around the edge to keep the edges flat. That means, sew all the way around the edge about 1cm from the edge.

Tada! It's also reversible.