When my daughter was a couple of months old she started to gain interest in her surroundings and began to touch things within her reach.  As her periods of wakefulness began to increase I started looking for toys that were soft, colourful and interesting to stimulate her senses.  As I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for I decided to make it instead.  That’s when I began Beth’s button blanket.  The idea was that I would have a soft little blanket that Beth could touch and feel, it could go in her cot with her, or in the car.

I already had a large selection of colourful fabric of all different textures and lots of ribbons and buttons so I didn’t have to buy anything. I began cutting the fabric into squares, laying them out on the floor and switching the squares around until I had a good even spread of colours and textures. Then I started to lay out the buttons, trying different colours and sizes agianst different backgrounds until I was happy with the layouts.

Next I photographed the layouts so I would remember what went where, then sewed all the squares together to finish with two large patchwork squares. Next step was to sew shiny colourful ribbons along each line of smaller squares to make borders (see photo below). I also sewed a selection of ribbons along the edges of the sqaures so they would hang off the blanket.  Following this I then spent many hours sewing all of the buttons on, making sure they were very secure!

Then finally, I was ready to sew the two finished squares together, putting a thin layer of wadding between them, then finished the edges off with some binding.  And here is the finished blanket.

The thing I love about the button blanket is that my daughter still uses it. She loves to find the ladybirds and the ‘Button Moon’ button.  Now she is 20 months old she is starting to understand colours and we use the blanket to learn ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ and ‘blue’!

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