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Quilted Recycled Sweater Baby Blanket

So in between all the chaos that is my life over the past few weeks, and a house full of sick children and husband this past week, I somehow managed to make another quilted recycled sweater baby blanket. I found this adorable cotton print with brown bears on a lime green background and used that as my backing fabric.


I chose the softest wool and cashmeres in green, browns and winter white that coordinated nicely with the backing fabric from my boxes of felted thrift store sweaters. If I didn’t have enough left of a sweater to make a full 6″ x 6″ square, I would make one 6″ x 3-1/4″, and with these smaller pieces I would piece two sweaters together to make a combination quilt square that I mixed in amongst the larger solid squares.


I made rows of the sweaters as wide as I needed for the quilt, moving on to the next one only after I finished the one before it. That way I could line all the completed rows in the proper order and determine which color squares would go best where. When all my rows were complete I sewed them all together to make the finished quilt.

Finished Quilt Top

The backside of the finished quilt top.

I machine washed the finished quilt top on the gentle cycle with Woolite and machine dried it on the warm setting. The pieces get all stretched out from cutting, sewing and ironing and I wanted to make sure I was working with a properly sized quilt before putting on the batting and backing fabric.

Washed and dried quilt ready for finishing.

I put a layer of cotton quilt batting in between the sweater and the cotton.

Cotton quilt batting layered between the sweater quilt and the cotton fabric backing.

The finished quilt.

I think part of the charm of these recycled sweater quilts is that they aren’t perfect. You can see that mine is not a perfect square when it was all finished, but it’s really soft and cuddly and destined to be some child’s favorite blanket.

And remarkably, I’ve actually managed to put this quilt and the slightly larger lap quilt I made in December up for sale in my Etsy shop!

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Comments

  1. Love this! And the design on the fabric you used for the backing is just adorable!

  2. You know I will be asking you to make me one of these adorable blankets in the future. Don’t worry…you still have awhile!!!!

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