Receiving Blankets Tutorial {Part I}

I'm going to try my hardest to do a tutorial on how to make these very easy receiving blankets. When I say easy, I mean you'll be able to make two in one evening and be so excited and proud of yourself that you completely such an easy and cute blanket for the up coming baby shower you have in two days. The hardest part will be my tutorial...I hope I don't make it more complicated by explaining it with words and pictures...for that reason, I'm going to do this in parts. Tonight, I will explain how to prepare, cut and pin the material-that way if there are any questions, we can answer as we go...here goes:

1-buy 1 yard of a fun flannel fabric and 1 1/2 yards of a complementary flannel fabric for the back of the receiving blanket.

2-wash, dry and iron your fabric

3-fold each fabric in half and then in half again...it should look like a rectangle.

4-lay your 1 yard folded rectangle on your cutting mat and cut to a perfect square. Make the square as big as the fabric will allow depending on how uneven the sides are. It usually will only make a 15-17 inch square. Refer to the pictures below (mine was already cut...sorry...mine ended up being 15x15...so obviously once I unfold the fabric it will be a 30x30 square...BUT DON'T OPEN YOUR FABRIC YET)

5-do the same thing as in step 4 with your 1 1/2 of flannel fabric---whatever your smaller fabric ended up being, will decide what you will cut your large square...for example, my small folded fabric was 15x15 so my larger folded fabric had to be 5 inches larger 20x20....if yours is 16.5x16.5, then your larger fabric will be 21.5x21.5 (that's folded remember...when you open up your larger fabric it will be 10 inches larger....so my folded 15x15 and 20x20 squares with open up to be 30x30 and 40x40), here are a few pictures. (again mine was already cut before I decided to do this tutorial)
6-don't unfold anything yet...give them both a nice press with the iron along their folded sides to get the fabric to remember those creases.

7-now open up your fabric.

8-put right sides together and match up a center line on the smaller fabric with a center line on the larger fabric.

9-Pin the top at the center (where your ironed lines are)

10-then pin that whole side (it's a little hard to see my pins in the picture below, but they are there)

11-next, turn and repeat steps 8-10, obviously you'll have to pull the smaller fabric up and over to meet center ironed lines together...I've tried to capture the process in the following pictures. You will do this four times, the pinning process that is, since there are four sides in a square.

Your corners will start to look like this as you go around...

Once you've pinned all sides your project should look something like this...

Please comment with any questions...tomorrow we will begin sewing.