Jean Blanket

This summer has been pretty busy with John in school and lots of other things going on. But with his two week break finally here before fall semester, we can go camping again!!! And, man, we are so ready for some fresh mountain air!

As much as I love camping, the only thing I don't like is being cold at night... the times when you can't fall asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night and your toes are ice cold... Yeah, that stinks.

Luckily, John had a genius solution to this which was one of those "why didn't I think of that" solutions: a jean blanket.

It all happened when I suddenly had a large amount of old jeans that needed to be turned into something. I wanted to turn them into a jean blanket anyway for picnics and things, but I hadn't thought of using it as a camping blanket!

We tried it out once it was done and it was the best thing ever! Neither of us were cold at all! It was so great, that once David was big enough for his own sleeping bag, I made a second jean blanket for him to use on our campouts.

To make these jean blankets, I decided on a pattern, and made a cardboard cut out of the size square or shape I wanted to use as a template. A friend saw me working on one of these blankets and asked what the dimensions were for my blanket... I honestly didn't know. I'm not super into patterns and this was just a "see how it turns out in the end" kind of project without a lot of official measuring.

I ended up cutting out all the squares, sewing them into the pattern I wanted and then doing the same thing with the other side. For the first blanket, I had a lot of smaller scraps left so I used them to make a type of scrap border that turned out fun. I did a little bit of scrap border on the second blanket two, but I also used a flannel blanket in the middle (Go BYU!!). I'm actually in the middle of making a third blanket that will be another full jean one.

After both sides were done, I bought some quilt batting and sewed the layers together inside out. I laid one layer upside down with the second layer facing the same way on top of it followed by the batting. I sewed almost all of the edges leaving a space big enough to flip the blanket right side out again. With the blanket the right way, I sewed along the edges to keep them a little more flat and straight. When I got to the edge that wasn't sewn yet, I folded the jean over itself and kind of tucked it in before sewing the edge of it (kind of like how I sewed David's octopus pillow). The last thing I did was take a needle and thread and sew the front of the blanket to the back of the blanket every few squares so it would stay together better as a blanket and wouldn't turn into a weird, lumpy, half-full love sack... haha :)

And that was it! I am so glad I made these jean quilts. I have never been cold on a campout since! And they're nice to pull out when the kids want to have a picnic in the backyard or at a park or something. The only issue is that I seem to have kids faster than I go through jeans! Haha! Hopefully I'll be able to get enough new jean material by the time I have another little one freezing their toes-ies off! If not, I'd probably just have to let them use mine until I make a new one. Talk about motivation. lol.