A little blanket refashion

Inspired by my lurking over at Wardrobe Refashion and SE’s pleas to patch the giant (and small) holes in his blanket, I did a little blanket refashioning last night.

I was hard-pressed to find a before picture of his blanket, being I didn’t take any last night before I hacked it up.  I did come across one where you can see the back and the binding.

Playing in blankets

So, the back of his little quilt (made by my mom years ago, when he was small *sniff*) was made of a lime-green fabric, I think there were magic-type things on it.  The binding, which is hard to see here, was a rainbow stripe on light blue, cut on the bias.  The quilt was tied with rainbow yarn and the binding was hand-sewn on with the same yarn.

Well, that green fabric had gotten a little hole a couple of years ago, so I patched it with the scraps my mom had given me.  Then there was another small hole.  It too was patched.  Then, sometime during the summer of ‘08, there appeared a BIG hole, right along where the backing was pieced together.  I patched this too, but it didn’t look good.  The backing had stretched , so I folded it up a bit, to pick up slack.  Then I sewed on my patch, which wasn’t at all straight.  It did serve its purpose… until more big holes appeared!

Finally last night, I decided enough was enough and went at replacing the backing.  Originally, I was going to take off the binding and then take off the backing, thereby saving most of the quilt.  That proved daunting.  Also, I had sewn those patches on mighty well and there were not coming off easily!

Tim had the idea to just leave the backing there and cover it up.  So that’s what I did.  I grabbed all the soft flannel from my stash and pieced it together to fit the quilt.  I then sewed the two, right sides together, and then trimmed off the edges, binding and all.  All it needed was a flip and several lines of stitching and it was done!

All done!

There’s the front.  You can still see some of the old ties (that have long stopped tieing the front and back together) and the stitching from the patch (look in that yellow square, bottom middle).  The construction isn’t pretty.  Somehow, the quilt was no longer square and it got out of shape while I was sewing.  Oh well, I was going for comfy, not quality!  I finished quick and tossed it in the wash last night.

Back!

There’s the back.  Those are aliens on the blue, rocketships on the white and frogs on the light blue, a little bit of the stripe I had left thrown in.  I’m glad I had all these in my stash, I would’ve hated to have needed a trip out just to do this project.  And what did I tell you yesterday?  I lay things on the floor and kids come to sit on them!

P.s.- Please excuse my terrible pictures.  I think we desperately need a new camera.  It will not focus without the flash and it does this when you turn it on:

Not quite open...