Affiliate links may be included for your convenience. View our privacy and affiliates policy for details.
My daughter has never had a matching set of bedding. I made her crib bumper, and she mostly had plain white or thrift-store-vintage fitted crib sheets, with a couple of random printed ones from Target thrown in. She’s never had flat sheets (well, I guess I did buy one once, but we hardly used it) because she’s always hated to be covered up.
She’s getting over that a little, thanks to sleeping with a blanket during naptime at day care, and it’s colder now, so we’re trying again. But I didn’t really want to buy anything, so I made her some bedding type stuff out of things lying around the house.
This is not pretty. It’s not for matchy-matchy types. But your kid doesn’t care if her or his bed looks cute, and I don’t either. Besides, what were you doing with all those receiving blankets anyway now that your kid’s too big to be swaddled?
The first thing I did was the sheet, which is at the bottom of the picture. All it is is two receiving blankets sewn together. If yours have curved edges, you can make the seam allowance deep enough to cover that, or don’t worry about it; it will keep your kid warm either way.
(It will if you kid will use it. Mine got really, really offended when I tried to cover her up with it the other night, which led to…)
The blanket, in the middle, is nothing more than a piece of fleece cut to size. Seriously, I didn’t even bother to hem it, though of course you could. This is lazy crafting at its finest. And besides, a cut up piece of fleece is exactly what she has for a blanket at day care, so this is what she wanted.
(Luckily on the night mentioned above when she started crying for a blanket at 2 in the morning, the fleece was still on my dining room table from making her yoda hat. See, sometimes it doesn’t pay to clean up immediately after a project.)
The pillowcase came about also because of day care. She has a little pillow there, so we bought her a travel pillow to use in her crib. It’s just barely too big to cover completely with a single receiving blanket, so I cut two of them a little bigger than the size of the pillow. Make sure you use the outside edge of the blanket as the side where your pillowcase will open and you won’t have to finish that seam. Then just put your pieces right sides together, sew up the three sides, turn it inside out and prepare for sweet dreams.
Now I just have a couple strips of receiving blanket on the floor in my office I need to figure out what to do with. But I’ve always wanted to do a receiving blanket quilt, so maybe this will get me started.
