Car Seat Cover or Canopy

Nowadays, It seems that every baby in these parts has to have a car seat cover/canopy. I love them for several reasons. It ensures that the blanket that many of us drape over our babies car seats stay in place and don't blow off with a huge gust of wind or suffocate our unsuspecting children. I also love them as a germ and stranger barrier while I am out and about. Sometimes strangers forget themselves and cross the personal space bubble and believe they have the right to touch the "cutie wittle baby." I am not a fan of this invasion of privacy and so I was anxious to whip up one of these amazing covers.

I found these coordinating fabrics that matched my existing red and black car seat. As I hummed and hawed about which fabric I liked best to be the outer layer of the blanket, I was given to huge bouts of anxiety trying to decide on just one. To help me with my indecisiveness, I decided to use this amazing tutorial to create a self-binding or "magic binding" blanket with mitered corners. With a self-binding blanket a person of indecision such as myself can have two fabrics facing out. If you would like to make a blanket similar to mine then I would highly recommend that you watch this you-tube video so that the tutorial makes sense.



I then used this tutorial for creating a car seat canopy and merged the two projects together. I also embellished the cover with some jumbo ric-rac and what resulted was this cute and colorful car seat to ensure strangers keep their mits to themselves and that the wind doesn't blow my baby's blanket away.
On the underside baby boy will have lots and lots of colorful robots to look at while keeping him safely protected from strangers, germs, and huge gusts of wind. I am really pleased with how well this project turned out. Liam and I love the look of this fabric so much that we are going to make him and his baby brother some matching pajama bottoms one of these days. If you are interested in this fabric then I recommend you making your way to your local Wal-mart to see if they carry these fabrics.

UPDATE: For clarification, in the tutorial it says to use a square piece of fabric but for this project I wanted a rectangle to better accomodate a car seat. I had no problem with using a rectangle. Just as long as you ensure that the outer fabric is ten inches wider and longer than the inner fabric. I also accidentally under did my blanket by five inches on all four sides. So the measurements that I would recommend for this project would be:

Inner layer (The larger robots on my blanket)
36 1/2 inches wide by 38 inches long
Outer layer (The black fabric with smaller robots)
41 1/2 inches wide by 48 inches long.

Proceed with the self-binding tutorial from here on out.