Thursday, May 4, 2023

Unplugged and Lying Down




Back in December 2006, when I bought Swan's End, a then 94-year-old house with a 1991 furnace in it, I found some of my very first purchases for the place were those which served to help keep me warm. I have never forgotten the first morning I woke up in my house because of how it felt when my bare foot touched the parquet floor beside my bed. (My unfortunate neighbours must have wondered if their new neighbour was part banshee.) Over the next month, I bought a warm bathrobe, slippers, eight pairs of wool work socks, a rug for beside my bed, and an electric blanket.  

Several years ago the electric blanket stopped working. I couldn't afford to replace it, but it didn't go on my "want" list of things I try to buy as I can because my furnace had been replaced in 2015 and I had made myself a Thinsulate quilt in 2020. I decided I could do without a new electric blanket, nice as it had been to get into a pre-warmed bed on a Canadian winter night. The electric blanket awaited its fate in my linen closet, its electrical cords and controls constantly entangling other items. Last month, when I was putting away some of my winter blankets, I took the electric blanket out of the linen closet. It was time to decide what to do with it.  

My first step was to do some internet research on whether it could be fixed. From what I gathered, while it might be possible to fix the controls, fixing the heating element within the blanket would be a much more difficult and expensive and perhaps not even viable proposition. I tested the blanket and concluded that the controls were working and the heating element was the problem, so I ruled out "fix the blanket" as an option. I hated the idea of just throwing the whole blanket in the garbage, so I began to wonder if I couldn't turn the electric blanket into an ordinary blanket, and use it that way. 

Ultimately, I did exactly that. And I thought I'd post about how I did it for anyone else who has, or who may in future have, a broken electric blanket and would appreciate a few tips on how to do the same. This project wasn't anything like as pretty or as aesthetically interesting as the kind of project I normally post about, but it is very much in the "mend and make do" spirit that is part of this blog's purpose to foster, so here goes.




I began my conversion project by unplugging the controls and setting them aside. Then I had to deal with the wiring inside the blanket. My electric blanket was composed of two layers of fleecy fabric, and there were narrow, vertical channels stitched into the interior. The electric cords ran through those channels, looping from channel to channel at the top and bottom of the blanket, much as the red lines I have drawn on the photo above do, only much less wonkily.:) Originally I expected I'd be ripping out the interior stitching to get the electrical cords out, but I soon realized there was a much easier, faster way to do it.

I opened the stitching on the bottom of the blanket to access to the blanket's interior, and cut the loops between the channels (indicated on the photo by the blue arrows at the bottom of the photo). Then I opened the stitching at the top of the blanket and pulled on each loop (indicated by the black arrows at the top of the photo) until that length of wire came out of the blanket. 




I removed the heating element too (it was near the bottom). Then, once all the electrical components were out of the blanket, I first stitched together the little slit where the heating element had been (it's visible roughly in the centre of the above photo), and then restitched the top and bottom of the blanket. I did the sewing on my sewing machine, using the various stitch options to mimic the style of the original stitching (but one could also do the sewing by hand if necessary). Had I known exactly what I was doing from the start, the entire job would have taken under an hour. Once the blanket was all stitched back together again, I ran it through the wash. 

As you can see from the  photo at the top of this post, I now have a fleecy blanket in very decent condition that will be usable for years to come, and only its former wires and controls will wind up in a landfill. 

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