Make My Day Camp: Memorial Pet Blanket

Monday, April 17, 2023

Memorial Pet Blanket

My niece had the idea to make a blanket out of her dog's clothes and costumes but didn't know how to go about doing it and asked if I'd help her. We brainstormed for a while and I had the thought to sew pieces of the clothes to big fabric squares and then sew the squares together, like a quilt. I asked Claudette a bunch of questions, like figuring out how much material we would need - and she gave me quite a few ideas of how to sew the patches of fabric to the squares and layer different things together, which I hadn't thought of and opened my mind to more creative ways of going about this.

We picked 3 different cotton fabrics (black, pink, black polka dot) for the 10" quilt squares, and flannel cow print for both some squares and to back the quilt. She liked the idea of sewing the squares together like a rag quilt, which means instead of sewing the squares right sides together you do the opposite so the seams are on the front of the quilt. You then snip the seams, wash and dry it and they create a ruffle effect. Side note: this might not have been the smartest of my methods, I glued a lot of the hard to sew things onto the quilt - it held up ok during washing but even on low-heat in the dryer things came loose. If you choose to make one of these I'd either glue things on after you wash it, or don't do a rag quilt style.

We removed any decorative bits we thought we might use, like the ruffle around a hem and ears/tails from costumes; then cut the main body of the clothes into 6"squares. Macey played with which fabric and clothes looked right to her and then laid the squares out on the floor to figure out placement.

The sweater pieces were hard to keep square so I glued them to black fabric squares roughly the same size, and then sewed that onto the quilt fabric squares; then embellished them with the decorative things, along with patches she bought. What I couldn't attach by sewing (or couldn't attach well enough to really hold them in place), like pieces of collars and some of the animal parts like the cow head, I used fabric glue.

After all the squares were done I sewed them together first in rows, and then sewed the rows together.(example: I sewed the top four squares together, then the second row, the third and fourth, then sewed the top row to the second row, the third row to the bottom row, and lastly sew the second row to the third row). I sewed a piece of batting to the back fabric using a big 'x' shape to hold them together, then added the top part and sewed around all 4 edges. Lastly, I tied the front and back together in a few places with string so they wouldn't shift.