James' therapist asked me to try my hand at making weighted blankets, since the person she had been ordering them from usually has a 5+ week delivery time.
Weighted blankets are prescribed by a child's occupational therapist to help with sleep issues and to give deep sensory input. You should check with your child's therapist before you have them sleep under one. James has one, although he never really had difficulty sleeping. He does love it, and he definitely sleeps through the night now. All of my clients rave about them, too.
The blankets are supposed to be made to weigh in at 3-5% of a child's body weight. We usually make them at 10%, since kids grow so fast, and a blanket that is too light will not work quite as well.
A weighted blanket is like a quilt, but instead of batting, you fill it with weights. Some people use polymer beads, like in beanie babies. I prefer a fine aquarium gravel that is made from river stones. Five pounds (a common weight) is a LOT of polymer beads. I wash the gravel by rinsing it three times, and sift it to get the tiny particles out, and it works very nicely.
My normal size blanket is just a one yard cut of fabric, since most of my kids are preschool age. I use a layer of quilting cotton for the top, flannel for the back, and two lining layers of interior decorating cotton. I have also used up some of my uglier fabrics for linings, and even pieced some of my larger scraps. As long as the fabric has a pretty tight weave, I feel good about it.
The first step is to draw a 4" grid over the top layer. Usually this works out to 8 rows of 10. (32"x 40") Then I baste the four layers together with safety pins, with the outer layers right-side out. I usually put a pin in every other square. Next I sew all of the vertical rows, and the bottom of the quilt shut. If you can envision a down comforter, this is the effect I am going for. You want to keep the weights distributed evenly across the surface of the blanket. I like to attach the binding to the two sides and the bottom first, since a blanket full of weights is heavy! I use the machine to attach it to the front, then turn it to the back and pin it as I stitch it down with the machine.
Then I weigh the un-filled blanket, to see how much gravel I need. I use my kitchen scale, which now lives in my sewing room. Then I take the goal weight of my blanket, subtract the weight of the fabric, and I have the amount of gravel I need to add. I divide that number by 80 (the number of squares in my grid) and that is how much gravel I need to add to each square.
Now comes the fun part. I have a specialized funnel (a cardboard tube from wrapping paper with a plastic cup taped to the top) that I feed down each row. The kitchen scale is used to weight out individual portions of filling. I use this to direct the gravel exactly where I want it to go. I fill up one horizontal row, then stitch it closed. I do this all of the way up the blanket, and finally I finish by attaching the binding to the top side.
It is a tedious job, and there isn't much artistic investment, but I do get paid $50 for each blanket. I don't charge much for these, because I don't want parents to not buy a therapeutic product for their children if they need it. I have made one blanket so far in a double size, and it was a challenge. I have made a few pieced tops, but only because I felt the need to be artistic. I wash them in the machine in the gentle cycle, and hang them up to dry.
I have tried to sell them on Ebay, but the prices there are usually lower than what I am willing to part with. Good luck with it if you try to make one, and let me know if you have any questions.
Jen in Florida