Car Seat Blankets (11/52)

Car Seat Blankets
Pattern: Car Seat Blanket, by The Imperfect Homemaker
Fabric: Various Flannels, 1.25yards of each color, similar amount of cotton batting
Dates: July 28, 2014

I ran across a fantastic pin for car seat blankets on Pinterest several months ago. Since babies & toddlers are not supposed to wear winter gear between their bodies & the straps of a car seat, and we live in New England, I’ve been looking for solutions. This pattern gets around that problem by not putting ANY fabric at all between the kid and the straps of the car seat. There is potentially one layer of the blanket behind their back, but holes and slits are cut in the middle of the blanket to accommodate the straps of the car seat, which seems the best of both worlds. I have not cut the holes for ours yet, as we haven’t picked up the car seat, and I don’t want to cut them in the wrong places.

I debating whether to cut slits for the shoulder straps, or simply cut out an appropriate sized rectangle so that there is no fabric between the baby and the car seat.

I did make two modifications to the pattern: instead of putting in the hood after the fact, I improvised and put one in all the layers, including the batting, and therefore had the seam on the inside of the blanket. I also sewed concentric squares after sewing the top stitching along the edge, to keep the batting in place when this has to get washed. I think they look pretty darn cute! The first took about two hours or so, and the subsequent ones about 45 minutes each, as I had figured out some short cuts. Also, when sewing through flannel, batting, and flannel, a good walking foot on the sewing machine is pretty much essential to keep the layers from sliding.

I did make two modifications to the pattern: I integrated the hood into the blanket itself, so that the kid’s head wouldn’t be rubbing up against a seam, and after sewing the top stitching around the edge, I quilted increasingly smaller concentric squares so that the batting wouldn’t move around or bunch up when it is inevitably washed.

How I made the hood:

I pinned out a pattern for the hood, and cut with a 1/2″ seam allowance:

I then used that cut off piece as a pattern for cutting the batting & lining fabric:

Then, I pinned the outer fabric inside the batting, and sewed the hood seam as one unit, again to help with the batting shifting when washing and to reduce the bulk of seams at the hood:

Lastly, a shot of the concentric squares as they are being sewn:

And finally, all three finished blankets. I’m really happy with how they turned out! I may end up making the hood slightly deeper, but we’ll see after the kid arrives and we are actually using it.