For the Growing Toddler

There comes a time in all childrens' lives when the baby blankets they've known for their entire lives are no longer sufficient. Baby blankets start to expose little toes, or reach only to the toddler's tummy. Many parents at this stage in their children's lives know what must come next: comfortable cot bedding and a cot coverlet.

The cot coverlet is the quintessential blanket of young childhood. Symbolizing an important step forward from the light-and-fluffy baby blankets of infancy, the cot coverlet is designed to be more like an adult's comforter; it has more padding, more depth, and often a more sophisticated design.

Moving Beyond Baby Blankets

Infant bedding and baby blankets are often simple in design, with a few cuddly-looking characters printed in pattern. These type of baby blankets are easy to mass-produce, require very little design, and can be endlessly re-printed on other fabrics to create a generic "bedding set". Nursery sets of this type are created in pale or pastel colors and generally display no advanced artistic design or structure, except that the pattern might be printed larger on large articles such as crib bumpers or wall hangers. More expensive nursery sets might have separate patterns for decorative accents and baby blankets, but ordinarily, nursery sets seem to be created more for the parent who desires surrounding their child with cutesy baby blankets and soft colors.

When a baby becomes a toddler, however, the entire bedding and nursery scheme changes. Now the design is a bit more mature, with separate elements for decorative value and a more complicated theme. Colors become bolder than is considered appropriate for baby blankets; pastels are still common for toddler girls' bedding, but now there are striking patterns, high-contrast color combinations, and complex arrangement of figures within a theme. Where baby blankets might have shown an assortment of teddy bears, the same variant of toddler bedding and room decor will show them engaged in activity, separate or together, in pillow shapes and in cut-outs on the wall. Not only has the little one left the bassinette behind, but now they're venturing into the territory of sophisticated and thought-provoking design.

An Introduction to Aesthetics

Cot coverlets, unlike baby blankets, are designed to be fun, artistic, and expansive, with large-print patterns or unique scenarios shown. They're a much larger canvas than baby blankets could be, and so designers are free to create wild, oversized designs that cross the boundary between "cute" and "stylish". The cot coverlet is the centerpiece of the young child's room, meant to bring all the design elements together in one overt display. For example, a room theme of knights and dragons might include a cot coverlet where the two are in combat, thus bringing all the disparate elements of the theme scattered around the room (tower, dragon, horse, knight) into juxtaposition with each other. This level of cohesive design is difficult to find in infant nursery design, especially in baby blankets - although this could be credited to the fact that baby blankets frequently need to be washed, and so maintaining a cohesive nursery design that includes the baby blankets as an integral part is much more difficult than in the room of a toddler, where blankets and bedding aren't changed as often.