Stuffed Animal Sleeping Bags

Stuffed Animal Sleeping Bags

(This is my first illustrated tutorial. You can tell. Sorry.)

Opal has a number of baby blankets for dolls, which are mostly used for stuffed animals, but she wanted a sleeping bag.

Puppy sleeping in sleeping bag.

This is a very easy project. The seams are all straight and only one of them is at all challenging. It takes about 10 minutes conception to completion if you're experienced and you live in the kind of house that has a good-sized scrap of polarfleece and a bunch of stuffing sitting around just in case. It makes a sleeping bag with a built-in pillow, which would work well for a doll if your child is that way inclined. (Mine leaves her doll naked in a corner and dresses stuffed dogs.)

Supplies:

1. A scrap of polarfleece about 9 inches by 15 inches or so (ideal sizing depends on your stuffed animal).
2. A generous handful of stuffing. Maybe two if you have a very large stuffed animal

1. Lay your stuffed animal on the polar fleece or a piece of paper to determine an appropriate size for the sleeping bag. That is, you want a rectangle large enough for the stuffed animal to fit in. The pillow needs to stick up a bit above the animal's head for most animals. Be generous on width to make it easier to get the animal in and out. The seams are going to be about 1/4" so you're not going to lose too much there.

The scrap of polarfleece, in all its scrappy glory and then folded to fit the dog.

2. Cut a rectangle twice the width of your finished sleeping bag (so, if you used paper, treat it as a pattern piece which says "Cut one on fold" with the fold along a long side.)

Polarfleece neatly cut.

3. Once again eyeballing your stuffed animal, cut a slit across the top layer of polarfleece that will divide the pillow from the blanket proper.

The slit made.

4. Fold the polarfleece right side to right side, if you can figure out which side that is.

5. Stitch around all the outside edges with a medium zigzag. If you have an older child, you might want to stitch only partway up the blanket part. I tried that, because it's more realistic. My toddler was horrified. "My doggie will fall out!" Fortunately it was easy to fix.

The stitched edges.

6. Turn the top and the bottom.

Turned and ready to stuff.

7. If you are an inexperienced sewer, you may want to sew most of the way across the pillow, stuff the pillow, and then sew the remaining way across. Personally, I just shove the stuffing into it unsewn and kind of mash it out of my way as I sew the seam. Either way, you're going to put the stuffing into the pillow and sew its bottom edge down with same zigzag stitch, right out on top where it shows and everything.

Doesn't that look like a lot of stuffing? It's not, really.

Close-up of the stitching that keeps the pillow closed. Yours will probably be neater. And nobody will see it anyway!

Hey presto, you're done.

If your small child might decide to carry a stuffed animal everywhere in its sleeping bag, you might want to put loops or a handle into the top seam while you're sewing it.