Christmas Catch Up Part 2: Just What You've Been Weighting For

For Christmas, I gave my mother a box with some fabric, some weighted pellets, and a note that said "sewing included".

I knew she wanted a special size of weighted blanket, but I wasn't sure exactly how heavy she wanted it or what size she wanted, so I thought it was best to confirm these things before I put the work in.

For anyone interested in making a weighted blanket, let me just say that, in my experience (as is the case with many homemade things), it certainly didn't save me any money to make it myself. I went back to Michael's on a regular basis to buy one bag of pellets at a time. Which was difficult because there were a number of bags that had ill-formed pellets that I didn't want. So I ended up with two very different colours and sizes of pellets.

I also picked up what I think was a cloth shower curtain from the clearance section at Marshall's. It was a really fun print, and a bit bigger of a print than you would generally get on a quilting cotton. Plus, because my mom wanted a smaller blanket, I was able to use the curtain for both the front and the back. And even with all these cost savings, it was still over $60 to make basically a child-sized one and that doesn't include any of my time.

After I had confirmed what size and weight she wanted, and collecting all my bags of pellets, I got to work. Step 1 was to decide on how many sections I was going to split the blanket into and then evenly divide the pellets across the blanket.

I borrowed my friend's kitchen scale and (after some quick math), measured out the pellets. I ended up having 70 squares in my blanket, which meant I needed 70 different containers to house everything. Good thing I had been saving sour cream containers over covid :D. 

It was also a good thing I had borrowed my friend's scale and not just tried to do it by volume, since it turned out my pellets were very different sizes (even though they were all the same brand). This meant I had some squares that were far more full than others. 

I left an edge around the outside of the blanket by stitching about 2" in from the 2 sides and the bottom. I then marked and marked and marked - it was a lot of marking. I made my squares 4", and I didn't want to draw full lines because I wasn't sure about getting them out when I was done, so I had to put ticks frequently enough so I could know where to stitch.

I sewed channels down each column so that they were stitched all the way from the bottom to the top. Then I went along and dumped one container's worth of pellets into each channel. I used a paper rolled into a wrapping paper tube at first to help guide the pellets to the bottom. I also then pinned down the fabric above the pellets to help hold them in place once I moved it around to send it through the machine. This was especially important in the squares that had a higher volume of pellets in them. 

I stitched straight from one side to the other to close off a row, and then would start all over again, shoving pellets down channels. It's certainly not a hard project, but I will say it got tougher the fuller the blanket got, since it was getting more and more heavy and pulling as I was sewing. Eventually everything was full and I closed off the top. Then it was time to pick a binding. I had decided to bind it so that I could just stitch straight from one side to the other every time and not worry about how the end was looking from doing some reverse stitching.

In the end, I decided on the grey binding. I was really happy with how it turned out, and my mom seems happy with the end result.

On a side note, I had considered a weighted blanket for myself, and did try out the one I made my mother for a couple nights before I was able to give it to her, but hadn't thought more about it. Then the other night when I was at the store, they had one in clearance about the size and weight I probably would have made for myself for a lot cheaper than I could have made for myself, so I decided to go for it. However, I had walked to store, which meant I was walking my new 12 lb blanket home with me. It came in a box with a handle, so wasn't too bad to carry, but I sure would have preferred if I could have carried it as 6 lbs on either side :D.