Lego Blanket

No, not a blanket made of lego, that would be pretty uncomfortable.
A blanket for the Smalls to tip their lego out on to, that can then double as a storage bag.
All in the (possibly naive) hope that this will prevent from feeling like many hours of my life are spent scooping up pieces of Lego.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Lego-it is VERY cool, but I do not love tidying it away. And I am sure you will not be surprised to hear, neither do the Smalls.

So I came up with a cunning plan, for a large drawstring bag that could open up flat into a blanket where the Smalls could sit and play nicely together (?) making all kinds of Lego-y things, and then when they were finished, the drawstring could be pulled and all the Lego will magically be contained back in the bag.
We shall see.

Anyway, if you want to make one too….

This is what you need:

• Fabric-I used a duvet cover I found in a charity shop, and sewed on these awesome Dr Suess panels, that were an unexpected and fabulous surprise in the post during My Make Do and Mend Year
  
• Sewing machine and thread
• Scissors
• Pencil/tailors chalk/fabric pen
• String
• Pins
• Safety pin

This is what you do:

• Decide roughly how big you want your bag to be, and then take a length of string and measure out the radius of your circle (half the diameter, for those of you struggling to remember your GCSE Maths like me!)
• Tie a pencil to one end of your string (making sure that the string is still the correct length) and pin the other end in the middle of your fabric
• You have now made a giant compass-go you! And can draw your circle on to your fabric
• You will need two circles of fabric-I was lazy cunning and cut through both layers at the same
• If you want to sew anything onto either side of your circles, now is the time
  
• When you are ready, pin your two circles right sides together, and sew. Make sure you leave a gap for turning out!
• Turn the right way out, through your gap
• Iron the edges so that they are sitting flat-I found the easiest way was to pin the 2 sides where I wanted them (i.e. nice and flat) and then iron. I did this in sections, due to limitations in pin numbers. Iron the fabric where the gap is too, so that it is folded down
• Sew a complete circle all the way around your blanket, about 5cm from the edge, to create a channel for your drawstring
• Make a drawstring-I started off trying to make a fancy version, but got very cross trying to turn long tubes of fabric the right way out again, so in the end I just tore roughly equal width strips of the remaining duvet and sewed them together until they were long enough
• To thread your drawstring, fold one end over a few times, and then put a safety pin through all the layers of fabric (to stop if pulling through),
  
  and then insert this into one end of your channel (that sounds vaguely rude, no sniggering). Feel for the safety pin from the outside of the fabric, and keep working it along the channel, until eventually, you come out the other end
• Tie the ends together, and you are all done
• Revel in the fact that you have just saved days of your life being spent shovelling in feasibly small pieces of Lego back into their storage box…