Bridesmaid Baby Blanket

Have you heard about making old bridesmaid dresses into baby blankets?  It is a growing trend as you can see if you look into it on Pinterest.  I wasn't aware of people doing this until  my daughter asked me to make one from a bridesmaid dress she had worn.  The "bride" was having a baby and as the dress no longer fit my daughter, this seemed like an interesting idea!

I didn't think to take a picture of the dress before I started.  It was a slim, halter top, floor length dress.  Luckily the dress was a single layer of fabric and not layers of thin filmy fabric.  I'm not sure, but I think it was some kind of polyester.  The hardest part was cutting into the dress and taking it apart!  My daughter is thin and the pieces of the dress were tapered up the sides, so there wasn't as much usable fabric as I had expected.

I decided to do a simple quilt with squares as I wasn't sure how much the fabric would fray, and how it would quilt.

I decided to make the alternate squares a soft white fleecy fabric that baby's love to feel.  So the blanket has the soft white and the slick pink fabrics to feel.  My daughter picked out a fleece baby blanket on sale for less than the cost of backing, so we went with that for the back. The colors coordinated really well.

It turned out very nice.   I did very simple straight line quilting that worked well to secure the dress fabrics.

It is a pretty neat idea - you might want to give it a try!