Baby Shower Gifts Done!

My cousins, who are sisters, are having babies around the same time and the shower is this weekend.  Despite knowing about these babies well in advance, the need for a gift kind of snuck up on me and when the invitation came a few weeks ago, I knew I had to come up with a quickly executed project idea.  While do-able, I wasn't really all that interested in putting myself through the stress of trying to get 2 sweaters done so I decided on raggedy blankets.

These projects are fun.  The one drawback are all of the little bits of flannel that come off in the dryer.  A few years ago, I made 3 large ones for Christmas gifts and I actually took them to the laundromat.  Not sure if that was totally cool but I thought an industrial strength machine was better equipped to handle the lint.

Anyway, the one on the left was my effort to be fancy.  I didn't quite cut correctly and should have run a diagonal line across the smaller pieces because my batting is bunching after washing in a couple of places.  It isn't really that big of a problem and I still think it looks very cute.  The other was my standard with equal-sized squares.  I cut these 7x7 and went to town.  A couple of years ago, I bought some scissors specially made for cutting the borders.  While any old scissors will do, the blades on these are just long enough to cut the rag borders without as much risk of hitting the line of stitching.  And they don't seem to cause my hand to get a cramp quite as fast as regular scissors.

Anyway, I hope they like them.