Homemade Baby Blanket

When you put the words homemade and baby together one of the things that first springs to mind is a baby blanket.  It’s one of the simplest things to make for a new baby because it’s a straight sided flat piece of fabric.  In fact it’s a perfect activity to do as a first project for anyone, even if you don’t have a baby you can always make one and give it to someone.

There are a whole host of different ways to make a baby blanket, some really simple and some much more challenging.  You can choose from different materials and techniques to suit you, most people are drawn to one thing or another.

A really simple design that I saw someone do was to use a piece of fleece cut to the right size, the edge was blanket stitched and then they cut out a picture from a few pieces of different coloured fleece and sewed it on to the corner of the blanket, there was also an option of embroidering the baby’s name on to it, if you know who it’s for and you want to personalise it.  This simple idea is really cutting out, assembling and a bit of stitching.  It is often very cheap to buy fleece and sometimes even cheaper to buy an adult fleece blanket and use it as fabric.

If you want to go down the wool route, you can knit or crochet a baby blanket.  This can be done simply using one stitch back and forth or for a bit more interest you can knit or crochet squares and then stitch them together into a patchwork.   You can look out for current trends and see what is in fashion in the craft world.

Again a more simple approach to a baby blanket would be to cut out a piece of fabric and simply line it and edge it.  But like the wool design you could do a fabric patchwork affect with a range of different fabrics and then line and quilt it.

You can use books to learn these craft skills but it can often be complicated to understand, especially if you are not familiar with the terms they use.  I have always found it much easier to get someone to show me how to do something, it is much more visual and if you go wrong they can probably see and sort it out for you until you get the hang of it.

Once you have mastered a baby blanket you can move on to more complicated projects like clothing and soft toys.  Of course there are many other things that aren’t baby related that you can move on to like cushions, curtains and shopping bags.  But I do think there is something lovely about a homemade item for a baby, it is special and unique and hopefully something that they will treasure for years to come.