A Dragon Blanket is evidence that you can weave most anything with pin looms

I've been doing some cleaning up on my hard drive and came across pictures from my Dragon Blanket project, also mentioned in a 2013 post on blankets and afghans. This was a gift to a young couple for their new baby. Since the couple was deeply into the Renaissance Festival, I wanted to make something that would be specific to them and their child. I went for a larger  blanket, this one measures about 38" x 46" so that it would be usable for longer time.

This project turned out to be a lot more challenging than I expected. I knew that I wanted to make a relatively friendly looking dragon. After making a few sketches, the only way that I could figure out how to create the blanket was by making a life sized pattern for it. That way I could break down the different colors and parts and just weave each part separately.

The large grid of squares is what I used to re-scale my plan from a smaller sketch. The pictures show different stages of dragon building. I used 4"x 6" and 6"x 6" squares for the background in order to give it a contrasting texture from the smaller squares that make up the dragon body. As with a number of projects that I've woven/constructed over the years, there were a number of times when I decided that I had made a terrible mistake and that this project was definitely not going to work out. That's usually a good time for me to take a break.

But it finally did work out and it was a lot of fun to do-- though challenging enough I have felt absolutely no need to try to do it again. My only regret is that I did not manage to get a better, less fuzzy picture of the completed blanket and I didn't get a picture of blanket with baby.

I need to remember that for next time.  MS