Blankie for the new baby

Friends of ours are expecting their first baby any day now so I sat down at my machine earlier this week to whip up a blanket for them.

Blankets have been my go-to baby gift for some time now. They are easy to make, relatively affordable and are quite useful to the new parents.

I found this adorable, adorable, ADORABLE flannel on my last trip to Fabricana and couldn't resist using it for this project. It's from the Urban Flannel collection by Valerie Wells if you're interested. You won't find it in with the rest of the cheesy baby flannelette...it's in with their regular quilting stock.

My pattern is always the same for these blankets...

1. After prewashing and ironing your chosen fabrics, cut each one into a square (or as close as you can get to square)
2. Lay the two squares right sides together and pin the corners
3. Lay your batting on top of the fabric and pin it in place
4. Trim batting to the same size as your fabric
5. With the batting side up, sew up three sides of the square plus about 2/3 of the fourth side (you have to have the batting side up otherwise the feed dogs on your machine won't be able to feed the fabric through properly)
6. Trim your corners before turning right side out
7. Fold in the edges of the opening you left earlier and pin together
8. Sew up the opening leaving as much of a seam allowance as you want (I always go with the width of the presser foot)
9. Continue sewing around the rest of the blanket so that you have a nice top-stitched edge

Now you'll have a rather baggy looking blanket so you'll need to do a little bit of quilting so everything will stay in place...

1. Measure about six inches to the right of the needle on your machine and mark that spot with tape or a felt marker
2. At each corner of your blanket, mark six inches from the edge on both the vertical and horizontal axis and mark each spot with pins
3. On the machine, line the blanket up with the tape and with one set of pins as your starting point
4. Sew up each side keeping the edge of the blanket flush with the tape
5. As you get to each set of pins, make the turn to go up the next side. When you've done all four, you're done.