first day of summer Archives

[This blanket is for sale in my Etsy shop.]

I detect a pattern. It hasn’t held true every year, but 3 of the past 5 springs I have created — without being aware of the repetition — a new blanket of orange, yellow, and green (see “Sunshine and Happiness” and “Marigolds” for the earlier ones). Those summer colors seep into my being long before they actually appear in the garden, and from the inside out, they warm up the chilly fissures winter’s strain has left behind.

That was certainly true this year. Every year I battle the changes caused in me by the darkness and the cold — and northern Illinois delivered a very cold winter this time around! As the seasons finally began to change, I have leaned eagerly toward the glow of the advancing sun.

My subconscious mind had been forming this blanket for several months, inspired by a page in one of the books I bought to train myself about color: “An Eye for Color,” by Olga Gutiérrez de la Roza. The strip down the left is (according to the book) a slice of Tapeten wallpaper. My bit of Googling tells me “tapeten” is “wallpaper” in German, but the book’s photo credit — “Tapeten, Cologne” — is no help in learning where this design actually originated. I’d love to figure it out!

From there, I sketched my ideas in my idea book. The wallpaper is reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s; the border of the blanket acts like a sepia filter. Together they pull up a storehouse of summer memories for me.

The six creamy-white “panes” complement each other: one pair is plain, one is lacy, and one is cable-knit. I chose the ribbon-like strips of a Nordic-patterned sweater for the perfect yellow-green in its motif.