Adorable Fabrics

I spent the day working on getting the pieces of fabric that will hopefully become blankets soon ready to be sewn together! I’m not sure how much you guys know about sewing, so I’ll just explain the process of getting fabric ready to be sewn in case you’re curious. Before I started sewing I didn’t realize that it was so involved.

Step 1: Cutting everything out. This seems like a pretty obvious and easy step but it is hands down the most crucial part of sewing. If something is cut out wrongly, or if fabrics aren’t the right sizes, it can ruin whatever you’re making and force you to start over again. The baby blankets that I’m making require a yard of two different types of fabric, so I had to measure and cut out 30 separate yards of fabric and make sure that they all matched up. It was rather stressful.

Step 2: Cutting off the raw ends of the fabric. When you buy fabric, sometimes information about the type of fabric or the manufacturer is printed along the edge. Obviously I’d rather have the adorable baby patterns show rather than the writing, so I cut all of the edges off. The trouble was that I didn’t plan ahead and cut off the printed edges at the beginning when the pieces of fabric were connected and I had to line up the edges of each part of the blanket so I could cut the writing off easily. I don’t recommend doing it that way.

Step 3: Ironing your fabric. When you buy fabric, it’s several yards long and wrapped around a piece of cardboard. Because of this, it can get weird folds and wrinkles that have to be ironed out. The ironing part took a long time because blankets are big and I had to iron 30 yards of fabric. I didn’t finish and I plan on completing it tomorrow. After fabric is ironed, it’s prepped and ready to be pinned and then sewn. Hopefully I can get part of that done tomorrow!

The picture above is of the fabric that I’m using for the blankets. If you can’t tell, they have farm animals, penguins, elephants, owls, and jungle animals on them and they’re really, really cute. I think I might be getting happier with this project now partly because I get to look at adorable animals on fabric all day long.