Cthulhu Blanket

Last year, one of my best friends graduated college. I decided I wanted to get him something for graduation. After much thinking, I thought it would be best if I made him a blanket.

Originally, I had wanted to make a pacman blanket because it would be a wonderfully nerdy thing to do. I got a bunch of felt and even drew out a design when I realized it was too daunting of a task to tackle as a first major sewing project. I didn't know if I could cut out pacman shaped pieces well enough or even properly sew all the pieces onto cloth. Thus, I decided to try something simpler. With much thought, I decided on a making a cute Cthulhu because I thought the Cthulhu I drew here was really cute and fairly reasonable for a intro sewing project: 

With the image in mind, I began making the blanket.

 First, I wanted to make the pattern out of paper. For the octopus tentacle part, I redrew it a few times. These were the pieces I ended with:

I then traced the pattern onto felt with white chalk and cut the shape out. For the tentacles, I chose to soften them a bit by making the tips rounded:

 I placed the green felt on the black and pinned the edges down. This way the Cthulhu design didn't move as I sewed.

 

I sewed along the edges and moved the cloth slowly, letting my sewing machine pull the cloth through as i directed it. As I worked, I became better at this part and was even able to speed up a bit. :D

 

Finally, most of it was done. I was going to put the head on so make the wings look separate from the body.

After sewing on the head, I took another pieces of black fleece and stacked it under the fleece with the Cthulhu design. I then took scissors and cut along the edges of both pieces and then tied the frayed pieces together.

In the end, my blanket looked like this:

I gave it to my friend over the weekend. :D He seemed very pleased!

I realized I ended up with too much cloth... so i might make a different blanket sometime, just for fun.

<3
Hao