I've been wanting a nice heavy-weight wool blanket and haven't been able to find one to buy. I thought about knitting & felting one, but only had to look at the long-unfinished Babette sitting in a sorry pile in the corner to realize that wasn't happening in this lifetime. About this time one of my daughter's friends returned a lovely striped sweater she'd borrowed & kindly machine washed & dried before returning. Not knowing any 6-month olds in need of a heavily felted sweater I tossed it on my worktable hoping for an inspirational idea to appear. I got the idea to turn it into a patchwork sweater & got to work scouring the house for outgrown or holey sweaters. I got all those felted & realized that I'd be needing a whole lot of sweaters. I hit the local thrift shops. But this being SoCal, wool sweaters were hard to come by. I turned to ebay next, and had great luck - never spending more than about $6 (with freight) for a sweater. I played around a while and came up with a wide zigzag stitch on my sewing machine that allowed me to butt two pieces together. That way the blanket would be double sided with no thick seams. I've been using it for a few months now and it's exactly what I wanted - thick, heavy & very warm.
