cashmere lap throw

I made that!

For her!

(Carrie Sue, my luxurious sister-in-law...we were in Switzerland for her birthday).

Of all the things I've made with my swifty new(ish) sewing machine I'm most stoked about this.:)

The idea and pattern came from the book on the right

which was a birthday gift from her:

my other beautiful sister-in-law, Elee, Woody's sister.

(Yes, I will take any opportunity to insert photos from my wedding day. Our photographer kicked booty (Ash, seriously, thanks again!) and captured it so beautifully. 

Bam, here's another of my favs:

Anyway. Onto the throw. You start with some 100% cashmere sweaters. The cool part is that you find these beauties @ goodwill or your favorite thrift store and buy them for 5 bucks instead of 100. Wash, dry, cut. I found these four colors that I thought would look good together.

So, you cut them into all the same width (15 inches is what I did) but they'll be different lengths depending on how much fabric you get from the sweater.

Then arrange them all on your bed to get a groovy mix of colors...

then sew each square together in a column, then sew the columns together...

And then you have one big piece...

Next, you sew the piece of you've created onto organic cotton bamboo velour, right sides together. 

So, being I live in super crafty Portland, I figured I'd have no trouble buying some locally. I was wrong. Lame. I had to order it online. The whole point of this project is to reduce material consumption but I found a cool company that answered my questions quickly and sweetly and the whole process was nice. However, in the future (and I do see many of these in my future), I'm going to find something super comfy here in PDX. Velour is ideal because it's uber-soft and gives the throw body, but lots of things could work I do say.

So after I sewed the right sides together, leaving a 10 inch-ish opening I put it aside for awhile. Because you are then to turn it right side out and hand sew the opening shut with a whipstitch. 

Hand sew! 

No thanks. I'll ruin it. 

I can't tie tiny knots. Great, the whole project is ruined. 

But then it got closer to us leaving on our trip and it was sitting on my desk taunting me so I sucked it up (poured a beer) and decided to deal with it. 

And it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be...

OK, so after it's all sewed together, you sew a 1/4 inch topstitch around the whole thing.

You can kinda see that the velour and cashmere didn't exactly meet up precisely so the velour kind of wraps to the front. Learning experience. Velour is tough, cashmere too. They're sensitive to being pulled but if you don't pull enough it won't work. 

But, it's pretty and oh-so-soft and I had fun.

Thanks Carrie Sue & Elee for getting me to this project:)