Super quick baby blanket

It has been a busy week...

I've thought about posting several times this week but just have never had the time. Today, finally, things have slowed down a bit. (And by slowed down, I mean "It's 2:30 and I'm still in my pajamas!") I had time to complete a project I've had the materials for for weeks, but just never got around to- A baby blanket for my boss at the job I'm leaving.

Apologies for the pictures in this post. It's snowing and gloomy outside, and all of them turned out a little fuzzy.

Soft and snuggly!

This was such an easy blanket to make! I used some materials I normally wouldn't, two different synthetic fabrics (gasp!), in the interest of making this a super quick project. Now I will tell you all about it!

I bought the fabric at Fabric Bliss, a fabric shop owned by one of my old friends. She usually has a great stock of unusual and adorable kid's fabrics, like the monkey print you can see up above. The reverse is pale yellow minky, a fabric I've never used before. It's a synthetic similar to fleece, which I despise, and so I hesitated before choosing it, but the kids at my school all seem to just love the stuff. It doesn't feel like fleece, which helps- I hate the way just touching fleece seems to dry out my hands.

Kai was obsessed with this fabric- I ended up promising him all of the leftovers once I cut what I needed for the blanket, which turned out to be a fair bit.

Here he is, cutting scraps off of his windfall.

The binding I ended up getting later at Jo-ann. It's the other synthetic, and another thing I'd never used before. There was a definite learning curve- my last edges look a lot nicer than the first one I did. Luckily, the errors aren't too noticeable. 

I don't use these often, but they are sure nice to have!

Anyway, I just squared off the fabric (after washing and ironing, of course) and sewed it together around the edges. Since I was going to cover the edges with the binding, I left them raw and sewed wrong sides together. The fabrics cling to each other, to the point where I decided it didn't even need to be quilted. I am going to call the decision not to quilt this blanket "Going for simplicity" and not "Lazy shortcut" because that's just how I roll.

The binding was the trickiest part. I used this tutorial to get an idea of how to do it and it worked pretty well. The mitered corners took some fiddling with but ended up looking very nice. Here's how you start pinning it on.

And that's it! This took two hours, tops. I'm going to pop it in a bag with a bottle of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap (they're going to cloth diaper) and give it to my boss tomorrow!