Easy DIY Patchwork Picnic or Beach Blanket from Fabric Scraps!

Hey friends! I hope you had a lovely weekend. I spent a good part of it outside, and while enjoying the sun I thought it might be nice to have a cute blanket to lay on… specifically for the beach and picnics. I hurried down to my sewing room and threw this patchwork one together using a bunch of scraps from my scrap fabric basket.

This project is SUPER easy to do and only took me a couple of hours to complete with a sewing machine. It would be a fantastic project for a beginner seamstress or somebody who only feels comfortable sewing straight lines!  Which is kind of why I wanted to share it today, because I know a lot of you guys have told me how you don’t really know how to sew. If you can sew two pieces of fabric together, you can make this. The best part is, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to this blanket. I didn’t measure anything, and I didn’t pre-cut a bunch of fabric. I simply grabbed what I had and started sewing pieces together.

The easiest way to put this together is to just make ROWS of scraps sewn together. Like this:

That would be one row of the blanket. When you make a row, just try to make it a set height. Again, no measuring, just eyeball it. You can cut larger pieces to fit the height, and stack two smaller pieces together as well, as shown.

Lay it out on the floor to get a visual of the size. Once you have all of your rows, just sew them together like so:

So in the diagram, you are sewing the top piece to the bottom piece. Just remember when sewing all of your pieces together, the GOOD SIDES should face each other so when you finish, the seams are all on the inside of the blanket.

When you’re done all of your rows, just grab a backing piece (a sheet works well!) or piece together some more fabric scraps and create a square the same size as your finished blanket. Sew the front and back pieces together, good sides IN, and leave about a 12 inch gap at the end. Flip your blanket right-side-in through the gap and sew the gap shut.

That’s really all there is to it! If you don’t have fabric scraps like I did, you can use old clothes, linens, or t-shirts. The possibilities are endless!

Happy Monday!

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By Dana Fox

Founder of the Wonder Forest blog and brand and bestselling author of the Watercolor With Me book series.

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