Crafting With Heart: Rag Blanket

Do you guys even remember me?? It's been a while! We have had a lot going on.. First of all this cute husband of mine decided to blow out his knee. Before you can ask, yes it was church ball. :) So we have been dealing with that and all sorts of school work!

Here he is the day of surgery with his get well balloons from my sisters.

As you can see in the picture, he has been confined to crutches. Dang it!

He gets around pretty good though!

I did this blanket forever ago, but just haven't had time to blog about it. It was actually kind of hard to find instructions on a rag blanket, so I thought I would help all you beginner crafters out. FYI, this is my first rag blanket, so it's not perfect, but it worked out!

My mom had brought over a giant bag of fabric and said that they were going to throw it away if I didn't want it. {Gasp!} I know, I know. Trust me, I had the same reaction. All of this fabric was from the big bag that she gave me.

I cut out 9 x 9 squares of all the fabric.

You need a top, bottom and filler for the center for each square. I matched all of the fabric up. The outside is just cotton fabric and the center is flannel.

Here is something kind of tricky..

If you want your center filler to show with the rag part of the blanket... you need to cut the filler the same size. So I also cut my filler 9 x 9.

But if you don't want it to show (say you are just doing quilt batting for the center) then you will do it one inch smaller than your other squares. So if I had done batting then I would make the batting squares 8 x 8. Make sense?

I pinned all of the different squares together. I got purple flannel because I wanted to add more to the rag part of the blanket. As I start to sew, I got nervous because I thought that the blanket was going to be too thin. But by the time it was all done, I thought that it was perfect. It would be a perfect summer baby blanket.

When you start sewing the squares, you need to have the right sides out on both sides. This is the top and bottom of the blanket so you need to see the pattern side on both sides. (Does that make sense?)

Sew about an inch away from the edges of the square. This edge will be the rag part of the blanket.

After you have sewn a square around the edges, you need to sew a giant x in the middle of the square. This doesn't so much matter when the filler is the same size as the top and bottom squares, but when your filler is smaller than the other two squares this is essential. The x is what keeps the filler in place.

Then I organized them into patterns.

I put out the fabric the way that I wanted to sew it together. This is important because it's easier to get lost with these blankets. You need to be very organized.

Also make sure that the back pattern matches up (like having the stripes all go the same way).

I put it into rows next. This was just mainly so it didn't take up the whole living room!

Here is another tricky part to explain... When you start sewing the squares together, you need to put the backs of the squares together and sew along the edge. Hopefully my picture shows this better than my wording explains. :) You want the edge to be sticking up.

Here is what it looks like when you have one row done.

You should sew all the different rows first. Then you can start sewing the rows together.

Here is when I had all of my rows done.

This is what is looks like when all the rows are sewn together. When you are sewing the rows together, you need to match up the seams so that you don't have a whole bunch of different sew lines.

Almost done!

The last step is to make little cuts around all of the free edges at the top.

In order to get that really ruffled look, put it through the wash. Do you see how my filler square added to the ruffle? They are really great beginnner blankets and they are a lot of fun to make!