Snickerdoodle Creations: Tag Blanket

Last week I bought a packet of cute little charm squares with the intentions of making this tag blanket. Unfortunately, as you may recall, when I opened the charm squares up I was a tad disappointed to find that the material was not all the same theme. So I had to go back to the patchwork shop and buy another packet so that I could make the blanket (oh, and what a hardship that was!)

I actually started the blanket last week, but you know how it is... I got part way through it before another shiny craft project caught my eye and the charm squares were left half sewn together on the craft table.

This morning I thought that I really should get my act together and finish off some of the projects I have underway at the moment, so out came the charm squares once again.

The longest part of this entire project was cutting and pinning the ribbons. I decided to make them a bit shorter than suggested in the tutorial, so I ended up having to cut some of the length of the ribbon off once they were pinned. Here is a picture of the blanket ready to sew:

I chose to use Minky for the back of the blanket as I had always had a fascination with it taking every opportunity to run my hands over the nice soft fabric in all of the quilting shops. This was, however, the first time I'd sewn with it.

I had never realised how stretchy it was until I went to pin it to the quilting fabric, then I started to panic. When you're sewing with stretch fabric, it is easy to sew right back to your starting point only to find that the fabric has been stretched too far and as a result, you end up with a pucker and need to unpick it all and start again.

As I don't have as much spare time on my hands these days as I once did, I needed to make sure the Minky didn't pucker. So, I pinned it to the quilting fabric with about 75 pins. While this might seem like a bit of overkill, the Minky didn't pucker.

To finish the blanket off, I simply ran a top seam around the outside roughly 3mm's in from the edge: