A friend is interested in sewing but hasn’t yet had the time/opportunity to brush up on her skills. She had a friend last spring who was having a baby, and she bought adorable fabric for making a baby blanket, but she never made it. So she commissioned me to do it.

I’m not a great sewer, but I can do straight lines fairly well. I accepted the mission, but I didn’t realize what a (fun) challenge it was going to be to figure out how to make the blanket. She wanted the blanket to be reversible, using one of the fabrics as the main focus on one side with a trim of the other and vice versa. I had log cabins on my mind from the crochet baby blanket, so I decided to approach this sewing job from the same perspective. The border on each side is four pieces. The shortest one is the width of the blanket, then each side increases in length to accommodate the previously added side. (See this explanation of log cabin quilting.)

The blanket turned out better than I imagined. It was so adorable that I had a hard time giving it to my friend to give to her friend. It took a lot of labor to carefully measure and cut the pieces, but the sewing went quickly–a lot faster than a crocheted blanket. I will definitely keep this in mind for the next friend who is having a baby.