Six, obviously…
As a kid, I hated them. Thought they were really scratchy. But later it was kind of a nostalgia thing to try to find the blankets we used to sleep on at Grandmas.
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They’re nice, but personally I just go to the fabric store and buy an appropriately sized hunk of quality wool. Sometimes you have to hem the edges, sometimes you don’t.
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If you buy the fabric in a much larger rectangle than you want, you can then wash it in hot water to create “boiled wool”. At that point you shouldn’t even need hemming, although of course a blanket stitch is nicely decorative.
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This whole discussion just seems surreal to me. I feel like I accidentally wandered into a convention for deep-pocketed arctic explorers.
My family always made do with military surplus wool blankets. I sent my son to Finland for two years with a couple of brand new wool blankets I picked up at a thrift shop for six or seven bucks for the pair.
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I don’t disagree about the sticker shock ($400+ is a large sum to pay for many items, including blankets). It indeed seems kinda surreal, depending on one’s interests. But I feel the need to point out that many of the people in the thread who are talking about handling or owning these blankets are doing so in the context of relatives/inheriting. As in, they were free.
Beyond that, boingboing has a long tradition of espousing premium-priced, niche/fetishistic products. Ever see their occasional headphone reviews? Or the prices on their preferred pencils? (Full disclosure: I allowed myself to buy into their relentless Blackwing hype, and I don’t regret it.) Point being, this isn’t exactly an aberration.
But yeah; people are weird, and our concepts of relative value are varied. For most of the product suggestions on this site, I have a similar “Whaa? Okay…” response as many of the posters here. For other recommendations, I totally grok the appeal. I was irritated to pay a “reasonable” $800+ on my laptop (already nearing the end of its typically gnat-like useful lifespan), but can absolutely understand the concept of paying half of that amount on a good blanket (still perfectly functional, at roughly 70 – 80 years in, and counting).
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My knowledge of Hudson Bay blankets comes from having done voyageur recreations. We would spend 2- and 3-day weekends in character 24 hours/day. Literally, waking up to people gawking at us. So all our equipment had to be historically accurate, including the blankets we slept in. Hudson Bay blankets came later than the early voyageurs (and are, boo-hiss, British) but were as close as we could get to reality. They didn’t cost so much then, thankfully (1980s). Our clothes had be handmade, of course, and thankfully cast iron hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Handmade 26’ and 34’ canoes…those were amazing to use. Being female, I was actually the “right” size and weight: voyageurs needed to be small so that the most amount of space and weight could be taken up by furs and other goods.
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How do these compare to Pendleton blankets? The only one of theirs in this price range is a king-size alpaca.
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