I spent last week working on a gift for a very dear friend who is having a baby boy in April.    I saw this tutotial for a chenille blanket and thought it would be absolutely perfect.    It took me a bit longer than  I thought it would, but the effort was worth it.   It was a huge hit at the baby shower.

Here’s a close up of the Chenille on the back.

I layered my flannel this way – chocolate brown on top, blue in the middle, and beige/light tan on bottom.   So if you do this blanket and one of your layers is a lot darker than the others, you’ll want to think about how much impact you want it to have.   If I had wanted the back less brown, I would have wanted to put the brown on the bottom or in the middle.    The brown seemed to overpower the blue for this blanket.  In person you can see more of the blue, but not a lot.

The tutorial calls for  topstitching to attach the binding.  I didn’t like how the topstitching was looking on my binding, so I pulled it out and attached the binding my normal way (sew the front, handstitch the back).   It was really  difficult to hand stitch the binding onto the chenille side.  I should have treated it like the front.   Then,  I restitched in the ditch on the front(which was through the binding on the back) with invisible thread.   I liked that look much better, it’s still not a straight seem on the back but it’s much less noticeable and it gives the binding  more security.

I also made a few burp cloths using this tutorial to go with it.  These were so fast.  I think I had 3 done in a half hour or so.  It’s a wonderfully easy, cute little pattern.   For the back of these I used some Minky I had in my stash.

I’m really happy with how it turned out and I think I would make this blanket again.  Next time, however, I’ll buy the chenille cutter.