Homemade Baby Blanket Craft
Make a personalized blanket for a new baby.
Submitted by
LeftFieldMissy
LeftFieldMissy
This fabulous craft makes a great gift for a new baby or for your own kid—no matter how long it's been since she was a "new" baby.
- Basic sewing supplies, machine, needles, thread, scissors
- Ironing board and iron
- Yarn darning needle and cotton yarn
- Two pieces of complementary fabric in different sizes. We went with 30" x 30" and 40" x 40".
- Scissors
Prewash cotton fabrics as they will shrink.
Cut the "inside" fabric to the desired finished size. 30" x 30" is a good start. Then cut your back/binding piece to be 10" bigger on both sides. (So ours was 40" x 40".) When the "inside" fabric is centered on your back/binding fabric, you should have 5" excess all the way around.
Place your "inside" fabric in the center of your back/binding fabric so the backs or "wrong sides" face each other. You can mark your back/binding 5" in all the way around to help you line up your "inside" fabric, or you can just eyeball it.
Once your pieces are lined up, pin them together and move them to the ironing board.
Grown-up: With your hot iron, press a 1" hem on all four sides of the back/binding fabric, towards the "inside" fabric.
Next fold the back/binding fabric up over the "inside" so your press line meets the outside edge of the "inside" fabric. Don't forget to remove your pins as you go. Do this for all four sides to form your blanket binding.
Pin your binding into place. It may be easier to pin each side as you press it.
Sew a straight stitch on the inside edge of the binding all the way around. Repeat on the outside edge of the binding all the way around.
At this point you may want to run a hot iron over your blanket to get everything flat and even again.
Lay your blanket on a flat surface and pin the two layers together at multiple random points. We did five pins, one in the middle and four more around that. Use a yarn darning needle and cotton yarn to "hand tie" knots into your blanket in the middle and other points. This will help hold the two layers together. Make sure your knots are supertight. Clip the yarn so that it's no more than 1 inch long.- We embroidered the lettering for our blanket. But if you wanted to you could appliqué the inside fabric or hand-stitch a design into it.
- This craft project really is easier than it sounds. Also, it's a fast and easy project for teaching someone how to sew because it has a lot of straight stitches and includes binding and such. We decided to make a baby blanket for my cousin—spring is the time for new babies!
Thanks to LeftFieldMissy
Submit!
