I did a little research and discovered that blankets normally weigh 5% to 10% of the body weight of the user. I have seen as much as 20% of the body weight, but that seems a bit excessive. I also discovered that these blankets are EXPENSIVE! I mean seriously expensive, to the tune of $50 and up. Yeah, that's a no from me.By the time I bought the materials (fabrics and the plastic beads for weight) I was about $50 into the project. Basically I made 2 weighted blankets for the price of 1 blanket.
Since the kids are still little (10 and 7) and still well under 100 pounds I was going to customize the weight to be 10% of their current weight (83 pounds and 78 pounds) this ended up involving too much math for me. I ended up making the blankets roughly 12 pounds each. They were kid tested and kid approved. So here we go.
1. Supplies
I tried using some of that super soft fleece but my sewing machine hates it so I went with flannel.
Now you can use contrasting fabrics, prints, same fabric for front and back. For my daughter did
matching fabric front and back. For my son I did 2 different fabrics because I could not make up
my mind.
Daughter got this cute unicorn fabric. 
Son got the sloth fabrics 
2. The measurements below are just for showing the process of dividing the material and are not the actual measurements used. The math formulas that I figured out are listed below:
A= fabric width B=Fabric length
(A) 48 inches (B) 56 inches
What is the common number these two have in common? They can be divided by 8.
(A) 40/8= 5 rows (B) 56/8= 7 columns
So A+B=(C) 35 individual "pockets" to place beads.
At this point I got my fabric and stitched it on 3 sides to make a sack. Then I sewed 7 lines (roughly 8 inches apart).
**WHEN YOU SEW DO THE 3 OUTSIDE EDGES AND EITHER ROWS OR COLUMNS ONCE YOU ADD WEIGHTS THEN YOU SEW THE OTHER ROWS OR COLUMNS**
3. Weight material.
I saw several different materials like rice, beans, seeds, other organic material, and plastic beads. Because I wanted these blankets to be able to go in the washer & dryer I decided not to use anything like rice, beans, or seeds because those can't be washed. The beads come in bags of roughly 6 pounds each.
So now for some more math
D=16oz per pound
D x 12= (E)192 ounces
So now we take 192 ounces and divide that by 35. That ends in a decimal (5.48 ounces) so I rounded up to 5.5ounces per pocket.
I realized that the beads might wear the flannel fabric out faster so I made 70 little "bags" out of just some cheap fleece material. It also made it much easier when loading the weight into the pockets to just be able to drop the bag in and then sew the row.
My plastic beads I used. You can pretty much get them at any craft store or large box store that sounds like Smallmart in their craft section.
I bought this little cheap scale as a means of being able to weigh the beads and then pour them into the bags without making a mess.
That looks to be about 5.5 ounces. It's good enough for government work.
4. Once I had the material sewn on 3 sides and my columns put in. (Honestly you could sew rows first it doesn't matter. Just remember you can only sew the 3 outside edges and either rows/columns before adding weight.
So I laid my fabric out and I decided not to fill each of the pockets on the blanket. So I weighted out 12 pounds (more or less) and then laid the bags out on the blankets in the set up I wanted.
5. Now take your material and drop one bag down the column/row that you want the weight to be. Give it a good shake to get the weight down to the bottom. Stitch that row/column closed. Add weights to next column/row, shake down, sew closed. Repeat until done.
6. I choose to not flip my material inside out because I added satin blanket binding to the edges. You can choose to sew the first 3 sides together and then flip the fabric sack outside in before sewing columns/rows. That's your choice.
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