My grandson’s birthday is coming up and he LOVES pirates! I decided to make him a fun pirate sleeping bag along with matching pj’s and a pillow.

It’s really not hard to make a sleeping bag. It takes just a few items and an evening or two of sewing. You can do it! Here is how:

Materials–

• Children’s sheet set
• Coordinating fabric
• Batting
• Pins or clover clips
• 36″ zipper

Inside of your sheet set will be a pillowcase, a fitted sheet and a flat sheet. The pillow case will be the bag for the sleeping bag. We will be using the flat sheet for the sleeping bag, pj bottoms, and pillow.

Directions–

• Lay the flat sheet out and cut It in half widthwise.
• Cut a piece of backing fabric slightly larger than the half sheet.
• Place two layers of batting between the fabric pieces and quilt them together with the method you like best. You could hand tie, straight stitch machine sew, or long arm quilt like I did.
• Trim the edges of your quilted fabric so they are all straight and even.

• Cut a 6″ strip of coordinating fabric the width of your quilted fabric or in other words the width of the “top” of your quilted fabric
• Fold and press the strip in half lengthwise
• Sew the raw edge to the top BACK of the quilted fabric.
• Fold the strip over to the FRONT and press, pin, and sew it down.
• You will have a nicely finished top of your sleeping bag!

• Finish the remaining three edges with a serger or zig zag stitch. Use matching thread. I didn’t, but wish I would have

Make the Continuous Prairie Points- (optional)

• Cut two 8″ strips of coordinating fabric. Cut one the length of your quilted fabric, and cut the other the length of half of the width of your quilted fabric.

• Fold and press the strips in half lengthwise
• Mark the bottom half of the strips into 4″ squares
• Mark the top half of the strips into alternating 4″ squares.

• Cut on the lines you just made up to the folded line on both the top and the bottom.
• Take your floppy strips to the ironing board.

• Fold the top left square down to the fold
• Fold the top right corner back to make a point and press
• 
• Fold the bottom left corner of the lower half square up to meet the fold
• Fold the bottom right corner up to meet the fold
• Back to the top, fold the top left corner down
• Fold the top right corner down.

• Fold the bottom point up and place it between the layers of the point to the right.
• Nestle the point to the left in between the middle point,
• Press and clip or pin closed
• Repeat until all of the points are folded, pressed, and pinned.

Your points should look like this–

• Pin the raw edges of the prairie point strips to the right side of the bag starting just below the folded finished edge and along the bottom half. The points will be facing in toward the fabric
• Sew them in place.

Zipper–

• With a seam ripper, remove 1/2″ of the stitching on the top folded edge just over the points.
• Place the top of the zipper inside of the folded fabric.
• Pin or clip the zipper along the edge over the prairie points.

• Using a zipper foot, sew the zipper to your quilted fabric over the points
• Zip the zipper up and pin to the RIGHT side of the other side of the bag.
• Sew the zipper down. You may need to unzip the zipper when you get to the pull to keep a straight stitch.
• Sew the rest of the side closed and the bottom edge closed.
• At the bottom of the zipper, sew back and forth to give stability to the seam.

• Fold the top of the bag over to give a finished fold to the top of the bag.
• Turn your bag inside out

DONE!! Aye Matey! You will have plenty of fabric left over to make some pj bottoms and a pillow case to match. SWEET!!

I hope you will give this sleeping bag a try. Please let me know how it turns out if you do:)

Until next time,

Update– my grandson loves his new sleeping bag. I bet he is dreaming of pirates!