Swaddle Baby

When I stumbled across BeccaMarie's tutorial for a swaddle baby, I knew I had found not only the perfect gift for my just-turned-one-year-old niece, but also another idea for Operation Christmas Child boxes! It's a little more involved than the Nubbie dolls, but it's still pretty simple. I made it more complicated by adding arms.

BeccaMarie also has a wonderful tutorial on how to paint the face. I went with a more anime style eyes but I think I'll try the smaller, round eyes next time.

See the cute little arms? I totally cut those out free-form and they turned out great. I don't recommend doing that, but it worked this time.

The back.

And the layers still separate!

If you haven't done yarn hair before, then BeccaMarie also has an awesome tutorial for that! I've looked all over the internet for simple tutorials on sewing on doll hair and this is one of the best I've seen. :)

Hope this gives someone some good ideas for crafting!

~Regina

Simple Spit-Up Cloths

...And, well, I'll show off some pretty spit-up cloths, too. :)

I'm sorry for posting late, we've been taken out by seasonal allergies. I've hardly done any sewing this week.

I finally finished my friend's spit-up cloths for her baby girl. I had tons of fun picking out fabrics and playing with the gorgeous colors. This sweet baby girl is going to have not only great, practical spit-up cloths, but also soft terry-backed cloths with ruffles and ribbon tabs. She also got the chenille cloths I made a while ago.

These more practical spit-up cloths are made from a panel of flannel sewn onto a cloth diaper. How big you make the flannel is up personal preference, but I like to cut my flannel to 19 inches long by 7 inches wide. This is just big enough to cover the center, extra-layered part of the cloth diaper after all the raw edges have been turned under.

 Iron the long sides under and attach a ribbon along the edge. I like to use satin 3/8inch ribbon, but wider ribbon could be fun and grosgrain works well, too.

 Then attach the whole thing to the cloth diaper. Easy as pie! Make sure your bobbin thread matches the cloth diaper's color. If your tension is balanced, then neither should show up on the other side.

 Pink on top!

 White on the bottom!

 All done! So easy and cute!

 Here's my stack!

 The other set has ruffles and ribbon tabs--perfect for little hands to enjoy.

 So fun!

Which one is your favorite?

~Regina

Homemade Chenille Spit-Up Cloths

Well, I made it into the next round of Every Creative Endevour's Creative Bloggers Got Talent contest! And the project that got me into the next round was these beautiful homemade chenille spit-up cloths.

A dear friend of mine is having a baby girl in May. She asked me to make some spit-up cloths and I took it upon myself to make her some of the most beautiful, soft spit-up cloths I could. :)

Before our baby boy was born, I learned about homemade chenille. I decided to experiment with it a bit on a small scale, so I sewed some small pieces up and attached it to some cloth diapers to make spit-up cloths. It turned out that these spit-up cloths are the best spit-up catchers in our house. Besides looking really interesting, they also have a great texture that our baby loves to feel. So, of course, I had to make some for my friend, but I didn't want them to just be boring straight lines. Nope, I decided to be crazy and do spirals and ripples. The ripples were pretty easy, but the spirals were definitely more ambitious. Ready see how I made them?

I like to use flannel for my chenille, but any looser-woven cloth will do well. Choose colors that blend well together and match the other side of what will become your spit-up cloth. I chose to use only 3 layers of flannel since I was going to make the chenille ridges pretty short. Cut the fabrics and a base layer to sew them onto to size. These cloths were cut to be 17x17 inches. Choose your color order and it's time to really begin! I have found that having the lightest color on top gives the design the most definition, as you will see in the following pictures.

I decided that I would be stitching with the base layer up so that I could see my stitches, so I laid all the fabrics on top of each other in opposite order. Then secure them. If you have some of that sticky fabric spray, then that would work best. If not, use lots and lots of pins. You can use quilt-basting safety pins, but I prefer to use straight pins so that I can remove them easily. I also marked the quadrants of the cloth on the back to help me arrange my designs.

 To make the spirals, I marked my center and then marked dots like so at 1/4 and 1/2 inches from the center. I recommend doing slightly wider channels than 1/4 inches--the channels were close to too small for cutting on curves. Straight channels would be a different story.

 Then I connected the dots to give me my first several spirals.

 Once you have your spiral going, you can just approximate your way around or use your presser foot at a guide.

 I sewed this spiral until I ran off the edge.

 I filled in the corner and expanded the spiral a bit before moving onto the second spiral.

 Two spirals!

 I filled in the rest of the spit-up cloth with little Vs following the curves of the two spirals.

 All done with the sewing!

 I love my Olfa chenille cutter, it makes cutting the channels so much easier! But you still have to be careful that you don't cut too close to the lines of stitching. I also had some channels that were too narrow for my cutter to get through, so I used my seam ripper.

 Unfortunately, I had a few accidents in the cutting. To fix the gaps, I whip stitched the raw edges together...

 Ironed a patch on using sewable fusible web...

 And then stitched on each edge and the middle, following the stitching above, to secure the patch. Good as new!

 Add the backing and binding before washing! Here's the front, ready to wash...

 And the back! I love these colors.

 Now the ripples....I decided to just do kind of organic, free form ripples. I had tried something more exact, but that didn't work out and I ended up having to tear out 6 lines of stitching, which was super annoying. I made this ripple cloth as a back-up in case the spiral one failed.

 I sewed one initial line and then just kind of followed it the rest of the time. Sometimes I had to stray from the original line to make more ripples because it started smoothing out over time. I enjoyed how it felt kind of spontaneous. :)

 This is the spiral one, freshly washed. If you click on the picture, it should get bigger. You will see that it's a bit shaggy. Those shaggy parts are where I failed to keep the spiral curved enough to stay on the bias. I ended up having to give it a hair cut. Then I washed it again and it got a little bit shaggy again, so it got a second hair cut. I'm pretty sure that it won't be too shaggy with subsequent washings...I hope. The ripple cloth had some very minor shagginess, but nothing that was a big deal.

 Our little guy LOVED looking at the spirals--I may have to make one of these for him.

 Sweet little hands.

 Ripples! I like how the colors on this one turned out better. I just inverted the colors. The spiral cloth's colors are: light pink, dark pink, then orange; the ripple's colors are: orange, dark pink, then light pink.

 And, finally, a fully shot because it drives me crazy when blog posts don't include a picture of the full project. :)

And there you go! Feel free to ask any questions!

~Regina

Soothing Baby Rice Packs

One day a year or so ago, one of my friend posted a picture of these on facebook.

 Admittedly, they're a bit freaky, but I thought that if we had another baby, something like this might come in handy. Well, after struggling with a baby who wouldn't sleep for longer than 45 minutes at a time, I decided it was time to try to make some weighted hands...

Our little guy slept for 3 hours this morning, I'm sure partly thanks to this slightly creepy fuzzy arm! :) He doesn't look happy, but that's because he was just waking up. He doesn't like waking up.

So, want to see how I made these hands that look like Grover lost his arms? ;) Here we go!

I took one of my old sweaters that I wasn't going to wear again. It's nice and soft and probably smells a bit like me, so I thought that would be good.

 Trace a hand onto paper and cut it out. I decided to do an open and closed hand, just to see what each turned out like.

 Trace the hands onto muslin, adding about 1/4 inch all around. Just be approximate with this, no need for perfection.

 Turn the sweater inside out and pin the muslin onto the body. Make sure to go through both layers of the sweater because those are going to be the front and back.

 Cut them all out to a workable size. I didn't cut right along the lines because the hands are such a complex shape, they would be hard to work with.

 Then sew along the lines. I wasn't exact and that's ok, since we're turning these right side out and stuffing them. DO NOT sew the finger lines of the closed hand yet (unless you want to pick out a bunch of stitches like I did). ;)

 Now you can cut the hand shapes out. No need to be exact with this either.

 Turn them right side out and check them. My open hand's fingers were a bit short, so I went back and fixed that.

 Much better.

 Now you can mark where your finger lines end on the closed hand and sew them up from the top of "glove" to where your marker is. This is how I marked mine.

 Now, you could just stuff those hands with rice, stitch them shut, and call it good. But I decided I wanted full arms since our little guy likes a bit more of a nest to sleep in. So I cut the sleeves off of the sweater--what was left of it--and matched them up.

 They were a bit wide, so I stitched all along one side to make them a better fit.

Now this part is a bit confusing. You have your sleeve inside out and your hand right side out. Stuff the hand fingers first into the sleeve and pin the raw edges together. The right sides of the fabric are together and when you turn the whole thing right side out, the stitching will all be hidden. You'll get something like this, which isn't the prettiest, but it's about to be stuffed with rice. You end up with something looking like this.

 Now decide what length you want your rice arms to be. Mine ended up being about 24 inches from finger tip to the end of the arm. I just folded the excess fabric into the arm rather than cutting it off, but do what works for you.

 Time to add the rice! A canning funnel works well for pouring it in.

 Fill each hand part way and then use a chopstick (or some other long thing with a blunt end) to help shove the rice into the fingers. It didn't want to go by itself, but this worked well.

 I filled mine rather full, but they're each only about 2 lbs. Because of the stretchy fabric, they actually tend to look much flatter in "real life." I just ran a stitch across the opening--no pretty ladder stitch to hide the end. I hate hand stitching.

 I keep these bunched up on a heating pad, waiting for the baby to go to sleep. I turn the pad on to the hottest setting whenever I start rocking him to sleep and they get just a bit warm in that time. A minute or so in the microwave (per arm) works well, too. You don't want to make them too hot, though. Be careful!

 Here is our sweet baby waking up another time. See? He really loves them! And so do I!

Standard disclaimer: DON'T BE STUPID with these things. If you're using them with your baby, don't arrange them so that they could shift and suffocate your baby. Don't put too much weight on the baby's tummy or chest. Don't make them very hot or you could burn the baby. Use your common sense.

~Regina