A few more details...

Alright, I'll give a little more explanation, but only because I'm SURE the rest of your life would have to remain on pause until I did.

The weighted blanket is not a huge hit at night... though he does love to cuddle with it during cartoon time (yep, we have cartoon time. He watches a cartoon while I fix lunch and I feel absolutely no guilt about it). I'm going to try reducing the weight a little, since it feels a little on the heavy side, and my scale is notorious for lying (it really is rude, and I've threatened it with replacing it with one of those sleek, little smooth-talking digital models. It usually pouts for a few days, but then resumes its naughty little tricks!).

Anyway, for those of you who want to know, which I assume is everyone (including those who don't follow this blog, but just know there is someone of my awesomeness caliber out there with all the answers they have been seeking), I will give you a breif discription of how I made this blanket.

The general guidelines for a weighted blanket include that it must be big enough to fully cover the child, and the weight should equal 10% of the child's weight +1 pound. So, I happened to have two matching blankets (thanks grandma!!!) that are the fleece throw type you can buy for fairly cheap around the holidays. I used these since they were the right size and already had finished edges.

So, first I cut 15 squares out of some scrap material (I believe it used to be a sheet). The size needs to be determined by the size of your blanket, as the squares need to be spread evenly over the fabric, with a little extra room on all sides. I then cut strips of velcro and sewed them onto one side of each square.

Next, I sewed strips of the other side of the velcro onto the blanket. I then attached the squares to the velcro on the blanet, and sewed around the three loose sides of each square. This made the inside of the blanket look like this:

Then I simply sewed a long strip of velcro on the top of this blanket, and the opposite side of the velcro on the top of the matching blanket. I pressed the velcro together, and sewed the two blankets together on the three open sides.

So, the blanket opens at the top by peeling apart the velcro (I reccommend using very heavy duty velcro), and inside are pockets that are also held closed with velcro.

I then measured out 5lbs of rice and seperated it equally into 15 ziploc baggies. I taped them shut (duct tape) and put one in each pocket inside the blanket. This allows you to take out the rice (or beans, wheat, or whatever) to wash the blanket

(And yes, yours will lay funny, too... it's just the weight of the rice.)

A few notes:

I would make the squares bigger than I did to give the rice a little more room to move and lay evenly.

This can be made with poly-whateveryoucallit beads (like they use for heavier stuffed animals), and sewen in channels instead of pockets. If you use these beads, you can just toss the whole thing in the washer and dryer. However, these materials are quite expensive, and I was determined to just use what I had (I'll detail my frugal quest in another post).

So, that's how it's done! Like I said, we will continue to play with the weight, because I really am convinced it could help my little stinker!