I thought I would continue on a crafting theme this week and show you another project I completed recently. First I want to thank everyone for the compliments on my baby blanket. The baby is due in mid-October and hopefully I can get a picture of the baby with the blanket after then.
To answer Madi’s mom Cecilia’s question I might guess that it took me about 100 hours to complete the blanket, but that is only a wild guess. It took a long time, but some of that was figuring out the pattern and some of it was wrestling with the yarn. Do any of you other hookers (or knitters) have a problem with your yarn turning into a snotty mess when you pull from the center? Sometimes it goes smoothly, but it seemed that when I was in a hurry that purple yarn would just become a big tangle. Oh well, hopefully things will go better next time.
Now on to today’s subject. A couple of weeks before the baby shower there was a surprise birthday party for the father to be. They said that gifts weren’t necessary but I thought I would make something special for him and his four legged family members. The birthday boy is a graduate of the University of Texas and a big sports fan so I decided to make a couple of bandannas for their two dogs so he could show his school pride while walking them. Currently they are living in Ithaca, NY where Cornell University is which just happens to be the birthday boys wife’s alma mater.

I started by digitizing the Texas logo and stitched it out on black fabric. Joann’s sells logo fabric for many colleges, but I couldn’t buy any for Texas locally. Lucky for me just before I wanted to start working these they were having a sale on the fabric and also had free shipping so I picked up some of both the styles of Texas fabric (I also got some West Virginia University fabric – my alma mater – no sense in wasting a good sale).

Above you can see the back of the bandanna. Since the bandannas have embroidery on them I like to line the back so it can’t catch on anything. I was really glad I got the Texas fabric because the orange color is not what I thought it was. With the fabric as my guide I was able to match the thread for my embroidery with the fabric.

My original plan was to make two of the same style, but while I was cutting the stabilizer from the back of one of the embroideries I nicked the black fabric. I put my thinking cap on and decided to trim the black to remove the cut part and then add the border shown above. The fabric had the perfect pattern to make a border and I really love the way it turned out.

These colors look great against my furs.
I haven’t received any pictures of the birthday boy’s dogs with the bandannas, but before I wrapped them I had Millie and Walter model them.

Does this bandanna make my head look small?
Both of the recipient dogs are a little bigger than my two so the bandannas might look slightly big for them, but I think the colors look great on my two.
Now my plan was to just make these two bandannas, but Charlie, being an alumni of Cornell too, insisted that I make at least one Cornell bandanna. “After all,” he said, “they live in the town where the school is and the birthday boy’s wife is an alumni so it is only right.” So it was back to the computer to work on digitizing a Cornell logo. I didn’t want to just use the big C as I thought that would be too boring so I picked one with the Big Red Bear on it.

It took a few tries and there was still a little problem with the stitch out, but for a dog bandanna I think it turned out very well. Here is Walter modeling that one.

Hey mom, dad says you need to make one of these for us too.
Unfortunately being a hoity-toity Ivy League school logo fabric is not available for Cornell so I settled on red for the backing. Someday I will make Cornell and WVU bandannas for our pups to wear too. Needless to say the birthday boy was surprised and pleased with the unique gift. I hope to get pictures of his dogs wearing them someday and when I do I will share them with all of you.
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