Baby car seat blankets - How to!

My next adventure was spurred on by my very special pretend cousin being preggers! By pretend cousin I mean the kind of person you grow up with, who you call their parents Aunt and Uncle but when you turn about 7 and realise your not actually related it doesn't matter! When this lovely lady is 'Our Von' and whilst planning a wedding she has a lovely baby girl 'Our Syd'.

Von had found this car blanket on pintrest which looked really useful for keeping bub warm and toasty but not so easy to slip off in the car of pram. so I set about making it for this beautiful baby!

We didn't know what baby flavour Sydney was going to be so I was looking for neutral kind of fabrics. I found these in Krafty Kats in Huntingdon, If you have never been it's worth a journey, it a treasure trove of cake baking, sewing, knitting and papercrafts and you always find just what you need, and often a lot of what you don't need! I'm always there last on a Monday before guides trying to make a plan of what we can do that evening so I find them a saviour!

So I purchased
1m of animal fabric
1m of yellow gingham
1m of wadding (I used the expensive cotton kind because at the time I wasn't sure what I was looking for and I was worried since it was for a baby)

Below are the instructions I used though it won't matter if you deviate slightly.

• Put the two pieces of fabric spread of patterns facing each other. Fold them into quarters and cut around them to round the corners as below:

• Lay out the batting again on the floor in my case, and lay the rounded corner sandwich on to of the batting, keep the two patterns facing each other at the moment.
• put the sandwich to the batting and the cut the batting to match the shape of the other fabric.
• Keep everything pinned together and sew all the edges together, leaving one corner open.
• Turn the blanket right side in, so you have patterned fabric of both sides.
• Fold the blanket in half , then draw a straight line across the corner you haven't sewn up yet. Cut this line off then sew it up with a large zigzag stitch creating  a hood.
• You can zigzag all the way round the edge it you want to, to give it a nice finish though when I did I wished I hadn't as I made such a mess of it not keeping it straight! As you can see..
 
• Now you need to cut the gaps for the safety straps to go in. What I did was got Von to measure the distance between each strap and put the measurement roughly in the middle, what you could do if place it in the care seat and mark out where each strap needs to go. Then you need to sew a large rectangle around where you are going to make a hole so that it doesn't fray or run into being a huge hole! I then laid it on my cutting mat and made 3 straight lines within the squares I have made with my rotary cutter like below.

There you have it! NICE AND EASY

 

Hopefully you'll end up with a super cutie to be 'swaddled' in it like this!

I had to ask what swaddleing was... apparently its like wrapping the baby up in all the layers, like it the picture! ha ha.

As you can see this one is a little big just yet, but I'm fairly certain she'll grow into it!

 

Update - it's even good in a bouncy seat too, and it stops mummy getting annoyed at the blanket always slipping off or being kicked off!