Anyone can do this!

Anyone can make this adorable no-sew blanket. But first, the important stuff.

Rob and I got up yesterday morning and left the house. Yes.we.did. We had sooo much fun. Without boring you to tears, I'll just say that we went to the mall (something we almost never do). But y'all. I needed new **ahem** under...wear and there's only one place and one kind I've bought for ten years. Without saying anything that will get the strange people interested in my blog, let me say I have to go to a store with a first name that starts with V and a second name that starts with S and that store is only found in malls. My word, there's something wonderful about having brand new you know what.

Anyway, after a romantic lunch in the food court (he did A&W and I did Subway) and really, really quick trips to Bath and Body Works and Hallmark and JoAnn's Fabrics and Sears and Michael's and Sportsman's Warehouse and Barnes & Noble and Target, we went to the movies.

We saw The Bourne Ultimatum. OK. Here's what I thought. The popcorn was great. But....I saw that The Nanny Diaries is playing! So Krissy and I have a Saturday afternoon date. I read the book a couple of years ago, thought it would make a great movie and I seriously cannot wait to see it. I just can't make Rob go with me though. I'm pretty sure his opinion would be that the popcorn was great. LOL

So anyway.



Heaven knows, I don't have enough projects lined up so I was thrilled when UPS brought this last night. This is a gorgeous baby blanket kit I ordered from Herrschners for my eagerly anticipated new grandbaby. I'll be working on this later this fall and winter. Isn't it sweet? Come on. You know you have to click on the photo to see that it's sweet.




And look what I found in Michael's. Charms for Crocs! Cameron usually shows up at my house wearing his little black Crocs. These monkey charms are going to be adorable. You should just see all the cute Croc charms.




I've spent so much time at Barnes and Noble in the last couple of weeks, with my birthday gift cards, that I finally ended up in the children's area yesterday. They have a whole Curious George section! So I spent birthday money on some little surprises for Cameron. He's currently completely fascinated with all the airplanes that fly over my house so he's gonna love this little board book. And I know he'll love the Curious George doll. Because, um, Curious George is a monkey. And Cameron has a thing about monkeys. I'm seriously considering a Curious George movie giveaway, I'm that sick of it. But I wouldn't. He loves it.

OK, back to the title of this post. I've seen these sweet fleece blankets around forever and I knew I could do it if only I could find instructions. Amazingly, the places that sell fleece look at you like you're weird if you ask them how to make the cute blanket they.have.on.display. So I went to the Internet. If you're one of the last five or six people on the face of the planet who doesn't know how to make one of these, I'm here to help. :-)


NO SEW FLEECE BLANKET



Here's all you need. Fleece. I think it's cutest if you use a patterned fleece on one side and a matching solid on the other. Scissors. And a yardstick and ruler. Oh! And some instructions. Which you're reading here.



What you don't need. THREE YARDS of each fleece. Good grief. I had no idea how much fleece you needed to make a blanket for a toddler when I bought this so I went WAY overboard. Better too much than too little I guess, but really, that's ridiculous, don't you think? What you DO need is one and a half yards of each fabric, the print and the coordinating solid.



The first thing to do is lay the fabric out on a table and cut off the rough edges, the selvages.



I cut my fabric into 54-inch squares. So cut both pieces the same size and place them together, wrong sides facing each other.

Make sure all your edges line up together and handle this fleece gently. Don't stretch and pull it. It's better to just smooth it together since fleece will give a lot and seriously stretch out of shape.



I honestly think I could have looked at a fleece blanket and figured it out. But this is the one thing I wouldn't have known and it's a biggie. You need to cut a six-inch square out of each corner. If you don't it's going to be a mess later.



Now you're going to go down each side and make one-inch cuts all along the borders. I found that laying a yardstick across the side at the six-inch mark made it easy to know how far to make each cut. And I used a ruler to mark off the one-inch points where I was going to make the cut.



Make all the cuts around all four sides before you start tying things off. You want the fabric laying perfectly flat as you make these cuts.



This is a good place to stop and have lunch. This would be a smorgasboard of leftover seafood, including half the jalapeno garlic tilapia I had at Johnny Carino's Sunday evening and crab cakes, fried shrimp and coleslaw from Monday night. You might want to grab the latest edition of whatever you read too. :-)



OK, I didn't know this part. The instructions I found on the web said to tie the strands into knots all around the edges. But I bought the frog print at Walmart. (I found the chartreuse green fabric at JoAnn's.) And the nice lady working in the fabric department told me she's made a jillion of these for her grandkids and she found that "looping" the strands together instead of just separating the top and bottom strands and tying knots worked a lot better. She said they hold better and they create a nicer border.

So I don't really know how to show you that except to say, do it like I'm doing it in the photo. Keeping the two strands together, raise them up and then bring them back through the circle, from the back to the front. Here's where you manipulate the strands to tie a firm but not tight "knot." You want it to be fluffy, not real real tight.



I have to say, I love the border this creates. It's so neat looking and the fabric lays together nicely. So thank you, thank you, Nice Lady Who Works In The Fabric Department At Walmart!



The back is cute, too! Don't you think?



So Cameron has some sweet surprises waiting for him to arrive Friday morning.



And his mommy will be pleased because I bought so much fleece, I made two blankets today! He'll have one at Nana's and one to take home.


Time involved? The first one took three hours. But factor in a lunch break AND the three loads of laundry I did while I was working on it.

The second one? Two hours flat, start to finish. Because once you make one, you're immediately good at it. You realize that the blanket itself is already adorable. It's soft and warm and cute. So it doesn't have to be perfect. Nothing about it has to be perfect.

What I love about it? First, it's not expensive. At all. Second, any child is going to love a blanket like this and I've heard that fleece is easily maintained. Washes and dries well. And third, I sooo would have let Krissy and Mandy make these when they were kids. There's nothing complicated about it at all and they would have been so proud to make and give these as gifts.

I've given instructions here for what I think is a good size for a toddler. It's all easily adjusted. Make it as big or little as you want. It's truly easy! And fun. And boy, I'm really glad to have that big pile of fleece off my to-do list and off my dining room table! :-)