Tag Blanket Tutorial

When my son was born, my sister-in-law made him a super soft tag blanket with ribbons that was definitely one of his favorite things as a baby. I haven’t had a chance to make one for someone else until now. My son’s daycare teacher is currently expecting her first baby, and I was trying to figure out what to get her along with the gift card we will give her.

You may remember from my doll sleeping bag post, that I haven’t done any sewing projects for about a year. Threading the machine was probably the toughest part of the whole project. If I can do it, you can too! I found a helpful tag blanket tutorial to help me get started from Designing, Dining, & Diapers. I made a few modifications.

Supplies:

• Fabric – 2 squares of 15×15 fabric. I chose a green minky fabric for one side and a super soft fine ribbed corduroy for the other side.
• Ribbons – variety of ribbons cut into 4-5 inch lengths. How many you need will depend on whether you do all four sides of the blanket with tags or just two. I did 2 sides with 7 ribbons each and used 3 different kinds of ribbon.
• Straight Pins
• Thread

If you haven’t already, cut your fabric in 15×15 inch squares. You can easily change the dimensions though and do anywhere from 12×12 -16×16 depending on how big you want your final blanket to be. This is meant to be a cuddle blanket not a cover up blanket.

If you’re using a patterned fabric, make sure you’re cutting your fabric straight. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I was more worried about getting a perfect square and I didn’t notice that I wasn’t cutting the fabric with the pattern. I didn’t notice this until I had finished the whole thing. It’s the one thing I don’t like about the finished product. 🙁

Fold your ribbons in half and lay them out in the spacing you want along the side. These need to be on the top side of the fabric facing in. I did it incorrectly at first and had the ribbons facing out. Pin them down. Repeat along all sides you want the ribbons. I chose to just do two sides because it seemed more cozy and the baby wouldn’t always have ribbons in her face if she was cuddling with the non ribbon side(s).

 

Then lay your other piece of fabric top-side down onto your pinned fabric. The two “right” sides should be facing each other with the ribbons in between. Then pin all the way around your square in preparation for sewing.

Sew around your blanket using a 1/4″ seam allowance, removing pins as you go. You’ll have two sets of pins – the ones holding your ribbons in place as well as the ones holding your two fabrics together. Make sure to leave a 3 inch opening on one side (preferably one without the ribbons if you’re only doing 2 sides) so that you can turn your blanket right side out.

After you’ve sewn your fabric together, if your ribbons are sticking out much farther than your seam allowance, you may want to trim them. Turn your blanket right side out. You may need to use chop sticks or a knitting needle to push the corners out. Hand stitch close the 3″ opening you left so you could turn your blanket right side out.

You could call this done if you want at this point.

I chose to finish the edges with a top stitch around the blanket and I’m really glad I did. To do this, I top-stitched 1/4″ from the edge around all 4 sides.

Here’s the final product. I was really pleased with the outcome minus the fact that I hadn’t cut my fabric with the pattern. Grrrr! I might consider making my ribbons shorte the next time around as well. All in all this was a pretty quick project though and only took me a couple of hours including setting up, threading and reaquainting myself with my sewing machine.

Have you ever finished a project to realize you goofed something up? Did you redo it or just live with it the way it was?