St. Louis "Galang Family" Blanket (2024)

In the fall of 2020, the pandemic was still keeping people from participating in major travel.  We had already taken a small step out to celebrate our anniversary on a road trip to Tennessee, and I was starting to travel for work, but for the holidays our families decided we should not get together.  

Our travel buddies Roland & Vivian were going to be making a trip up to St. Louis to begin looking at selling Roland's childhood home and invited us to spend Thanksgiving with them on a roadtrip there.  Since we had never been to St. Louis, we jumped at the opportunity!  We fit in some side-bar travel to Bentonville, Louisville, Branson and Eureka Springs, but in St. Louis we got a FULL personal tour from Roland, which also served as a sort of "farewell" tour for himself.

This trip was the beginning of a total house clean-out (his parents moved to Denver years prior), and they let me go through some clothes and fabrics they would be getting rid of anyways for my sewing endeavors.  I took home a cache of denims, old clothes, and wool sweaters, and decided to make their family a blanket to remember their time in St. Louis. 

Below is a sampling of some of the clothes that I was trying to use.  I supplemented with some fabrics that I have been saving, so all in all I did not buy any new fabric, which is a project goal of mine right now anyways (good for the environment, and it is helping me purge too!)

These are the sketches I came up with, which I enlarged and transferred to the base fabric with pencil.

I have always wanted to try creating a piece using denim pieces, so this was my opportunity.  Mrs. Galang had a lot of denim! 😉

When I was done with the skyline, and even after adding the plane, I felt it was "missing something".

So I started experimenting with adding some "sunset" clouds, with some old T-Shirt scraps I had.  I think it helped fill in the scenery.

BTW, here is the workshop!

The airplane was looking kind of plain, so I added some accent stitching:

I wanted to add some elements of the kids' T-Shirts that represent the four siblings.

Also...a "signature" or description:

The blanket needed a backing, similar to a quilt.  When I was traveling back-and-forth to Dallas from California for work I was stuck at DFW several times and was given many American Airlines blankets!  Even after using them on a couple of other blankets I made, I had enough left to back this one 😂

Lastly, I was able to make the trim for the blanket out of an old pair of flannel pants that I found at their home.  Not sure who they belonged to, or why I grabbed these of all things...probably because I liked the flannel pattern and coloring.

Here is the finished blanket!

Creating the blanket brought back great memories of a fantastic road trip - thank you Viv & Roland for showing us around your beautiful city of St. Louis!  I hope this blanket brings your family (and future generations) warm memories of 50+ years in St. Louis.