When choosing fabric for a driving blanket look for fleece with some kind of roads or paths for cars to follow. I found this fleece at my local Joann’s store. If you’re planning to use this blanket as a hospital donation, like I did, you’ll want to be sure to include a couple of NEW cars since you don’t want any germs going to sick or medically fragile kiddos. Choose fleece scraps that contrast well with the background fabric, so the house will stand out.
Fleece comes 55-60″ wide. The amount of fleece you’ll need depends on how big you want to make the blankets. 45 x 60 inches is a popular size for fleece blankets, and for that size you would need 1 1/4 yards. My blankets are slightly smaller because I had a piece that was a little over 2 yards and I wanted to get 2 blankets out of it.
Finish the edges of your fleece blanket, using your desired method. I chose to simply serge the edges with a serger and contrasting thread. If you don’t have access to a serger, you can simply hem the edges. My other favorite way to finish edges is to “braid” or “crochet” the edges. I recommend NOT knotting the edges, since they will be uncomfortable to little knees crawling around to drive their cars on the blanket.
I chose to use Smooth Fusible Fleece to back the house pieces to help them keep their structure and hold the cars snugly in their pocket. Either black or white Smooth Fusible Fleece will work fine.
Start by cutting out both pattern shapes from some fusible fleece.
Take the rectangular piece of your fusible fleece and sew it WITH THE ROUGH SIDE UP with a 1/4 inch seam to your house scrap of solid fleece. Then trim the side you sewed.
Fold your fusible fleece around to the BACK of your solid red fleece, and iron. You will want to test the heat on your iron, but I use the POLYESTER setting on my iron when working with fusible fleece.
Iron your triangle piece of fusible fleece onto the back of your roof fleece. In my case, I chose to use black.
Trim around the edges of your triangle. you should end up with two pieces that look like this. One red rectangle with one finished edge, and all the other edges are raw edges.
Place your pieces on your blanket near a road and near one corner of the blanket. (This is so the pocket will still be visible when the blanket is folded.
Pin the red rectangle on. Secure the two sides of the rectangle with zigzag stitches, being sure to back-stitch at the beginning and end. Using a straight stitch, sew down the middle.
Using a zigzag stitch, sew the blank triangle on over the top of the red rectangle. Be sure the regular fleece is facing up and the fusible fleece is face down.
And you’re ready to park cars in your little house/garage.
And this project definitely passed the “kid-test.” I let me kids drive their cars on it just enough for demonstration pictures, but then folded the blankets back up to keep them germ free for the hospital kiddos.
The three-year-old may have had a tantrum when he couldn’t keep driving.
I definitely need to see my Joanns has gotten more of this fleece in stock.
