How to Make a Baby Blanket

In celebration of my cousin’s son’s birth this morning (yay for the miracle of life!) I’m finally posting this baby blanket how to. I actually made this blanket for my cousin’s baby shower so it’s fitting.

1. buy the fabric- I chose to make this blanket out of fleece and flannel, two very snuggly kinds of fabric (I obviously didn’t think of the fact that the baby who would be using it would be born in spring, thus not really needing a super warm blanket) but you can use just about any kind of fabric as long as both fabrics are similar weights. One yard of each fabric will be enough.

2. wash it- prewash your fabric so that any shrinking or stretching happens before you sew it together.

3. measure and cut- I measured my fabric to be somewhere between 36 and 38 inches. It’s also good to keep in mind the orientation of any pattern that is on the fabric. If you’re like me this is the most stressful step as it can’t be undone. I use my self healing mat and a rotary cutter to get the most square piece of fabric I can but, in all honesty, you really can’t tell if the blanket isn’t perfectly symmetrical.

3. Iron!- seriously! I used to skip this step but it really makes pinning the fabric easier.

4. pin it- Place fabric right sides together and pin. I left enough space for a 1 inch seam (a lot but it’ll make sense later). I actually used to skip this step too. I can’t imagine what I was making back then. That may be why my projects looked like a wrinkly crooked mess.

5. sew- using a machine, I left a 1 inch seam and sewed almost all the way around (you have to leave an opening to turn it right side out again). After turning it right side out I finished closing the opening by hand (I’m old fashioned like that; It gives the project a little more of a handmade feel).

6. the last step is to sew another line around the edge of the blanket about 1 inch from the edge to make a trim. This is why I left a 1 inch seam, so the trim would have that extra stability of the fabric inside it. I’m sure there is a word for that which I don’t know.

So, that is how I made this blanket. It cost about $13 to make. I had bought a yard and a half of each fabric because I wasn’t sure how much I would need and ended up wasting a lot. If I had just bought one yard each it would have probably come in under $10. It took me a couple of hours to make this blanket because I was kind of making it up as I went and I also took some time to debate whether or not to add that last step of creating a trim. The second blanket I made following this pattern took about an hour.