Cut Chenille Baby Blanket

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to make baby blankets as gifts for friends and family with new babies. The quilted kind is fun, since I get to pick a bunch of cute coordinating fabrics, but I also love cut chenille blankets– they may be a bit more trouble to make (okay, a lot more trouble), but the results are just amazing.

Making cut chenille is easy, but time-consuming. You’ll need:

• Main fabric (the cute one that’s going to show)
• 4 layers of flannel in coordinating colors*
• Thread in a color that’s unnoticeable when stitched on top of your main fabric.
• Thread in a color that’s unnoticeable when stitched on top of your backing fabric.
• 1/2 yard fabric to make binding

*I’ve previously used three layers only, but then you sometimes end up seeing the back side of your main cotton fabric between the rows of chenille. I’d prefer not to, so I’m using four layers this time and only cutting through three of them.

Patchwork Baby Quilt

One of the traditions I’ve tried to keep up is that friends or family members who have babies get a handmade blanket from me. There are so many adorable quilting fabrics out there that it’s fun just picking out what I’m going to use! And every now and then I come across a line of fabrics that has so many cute options I can’t pick just one– so I pick all of them.

This quilt was made from the fabric line “Fine n’ Dandy” by Riley Blake, and I bought a coordinating set of all the fabric designs to use in my blanket. The set I purchased was a 10″ layer cake, which means that it’s 18 squares of fabric, one of each design. They also sell “charm packs,” which are sets of 5″ squares, but the pricing is such that it’s cheaper to buy a set of the 10″ squares and cut them in quarters with a rotary cutter. So that’s what I did. (and when I say “I,” I mean “I and my two friends, who I recruited to assist in my crafting efforts for our mutual friend, the mother-to-be”)