I only have three pins

A simple need, a blanket for my baby to wriggle around on. When I looked online the cheapest was $25 from Kmart, not a huge amount of money by any means, but a lot of money for something that we would only really use for a couple of months and given it was Kmart it is highly unlikely that the words ethical or sustainable had been anywhere near it.

The baby blanket we used for my oldest was a hand-me-down from my sister. When we unearthed it just before we moved house it was covered in mould. I tried cleaning it, but I don’t fuck around with mould so a new one was the go.

But never fear I had some fabric that would be perfect, kind of like a quilted puffer jacket material. I had used it in our old house where the windows were full of ‘character’ (single glazed, wooden framed that didn’t fit right so the wind blew right in). I had used the quilted fabric as a blanket for the windows, we suction cupped it to the glass each night to stop the breeze coming in – highly recommended if you to live in a house full of character.

So I had this puffy fabric, and a stash of bright colourful fabric… with their powers combined they would make a baby blanket.

But remember, we are Parenting from a messy desk… this is the season of life for done not perfect, because whatever I was making would be made during naps or while a child was screaming at me. I used a roll of wrapping paper to loosely measure out a square, I grabbed a picture frame off the wall to mark out the lines that I wanted to quilt – and of course I used masking tape to draw them on.

When it came to the first lines of sewing – I could only find three pins. Now, I absolutely have pins… somewhere. My options are to use my precious minutes to hunt for pins, or I could just make do.

My theory is with this kind of project, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Once you stitch, cut, iron and throw in some contrasting fabrics, no one will notice any imperfections. And more than that, somewhere along the line we became afraid to try and fail. Failure is awesome, failure teaches us. If I fail at this blanket made with three pins, all I have lost is some fabric that I already had.

So I persevered with my three pins, and then it was time to do the edging. My issue being that I had never used bias binding before, and even if I wanted to use it the cheapest binding (that was wide enough) I could find was at spotlight for $18 – and the aim was to spend nothing and to not have to put a baby in the car.

Powered with the confidence of three different YouTube shorts, and using a Farmers Card to measure … I made my own bias binding. It was fun, I learned a new skill which scratched an itch in my brain. The only fabric in my stash that I thought would be the right weight was vintage olive oil packaging… the verdict is out as to if that works with the neon leopard print I used for the rest of the blanket. I am hoping it is the sort of clashing that would work if a cool girl wore it.

The final stretch of attaching the bias binding tells a tale of focus. The parts that look right is when the kids were quiet, the parts where you can see the under stitching, or where the corners are not perfectly mitred are when the little ones wanted to file official complaints. The first child wanted to file a complaint about Lego that was ‘broken’ (jury is out as to which mysterious force broke it) and the tiny one wanted to complain that she was biting her own hand and that was not fair.

With a drastically imperfect process, the blanket looks amazing. And as if to prove that not worrying about perfection was the right approach, my baby vomited on the blanket within 30 seconds of lying down on it.

And to prove that it was a worthwhile endeavour, that courting failure was the right choice, about an hour after the vomit the baby rolled over for the first time. The best review I could have hoped for.