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

Homemade Paints!

I've been trying out lots of fun activities with our little girl this summer. She loved painting with watercolor so much, that I decided to try more traditional paints.

Recipe here (scroll to the bottom)

Flour Fingerpaint

1 cup flour
2 tablespoons salt
1 1/2 cups cold water
1 1/4 cups hot water
Food coloring or tempera paint

Directions

1. Put flour and salt in saucepan.
2. Add cold water and beat with whisk or eggbeater until smooth.
3. Add hot water and boil until mixture is thick.
4. Beat again until smooth.
5. Color as desired with food coloring or powdered tempera paint.
6. Store covered in refrigerator.

My little girl watched me while I cooked the paint, then she got to help make the colors!

 She LOVED mixing the food colorings in.

 Finally, it was time to paint!

 She had to make sure that each paint brush matched the paint it was in as closely as possible...

 Finally, we got around to some painting. I had to show her "how" to paint.

 The paint didn't cover the paper quite as nicely as I would have liked. My daughter also wasn't as thrilled with this type of paint as she was with the water colors. I tried thinning out the paint the next time, but it didn't help her want to do it more. So the paints sat in our fridge for 6 weeks until I realized that they had started to grow mold. Yuck. I guess we need to buy non-perishable paint if we want to keep it around...

~Regina

Alphabet Bean Bags!

My daughter is obsessed with the alphabet, so for her birthday (which was actually 4 months ago) I decided to make her an alphabet toy that she can really play with. She also didn't have many toys that she could throw inside, so I thought bean bags were the perfect solution!

It was a pretty simple project, though somewhat time-consuming. Making myself a template to cut along helped a lot. Mine was 4 inches square, but I think that I might make them slightly larger if I make a similar project again.

I re-used t-shirts that my husband and I don't wear any more for whatever reason. I did make sure they were in good condition.

Black fabric for the consonants, red fabric for the vowels. I cut a few extra of each color just in case I messed up later.

I took a while to find a good font for the letters and, unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the one I used--it wasn't one of the common ones, though. I found the right font size (they printed 2.5 inches tall, I believe), set them to print outlines only (save ink!), cut my freezer paper to 8.5x11 inches, and printed the letters out on the NON-SHINY side of the paper. (Be careful not to print on the shiny side or you'll have a yucky mess. This also will only work in inkjet printers--laser printers will melt the freezer paper.) Then I cut them out, being careful to safe all the centers.

I ironed them on (medium to high heat, no steam).

Yay, ready to paint!

And started painting. What I found with the jersey material (and vivid colors of the fabric) was that the colored fabric paint (I use Plaid folkart) would soak into the fabric and not show up very well. I ended up doing a coat or two of white fabric paint first, before putting the color down.

What I should have done, I realized after completing the project, was to put down a layer of the intended color to soak into the fabric and fill in gaps under the edge of the freezer paper and THEN put down the white on top of that first layer. This would get rid of the white outline and edges that I ended up with on my finished letters. Oh well, live and learn!

All the colors down!

They look so pretty! I let them sit and air dry for 24-48 hours, then ironed them (per the instructions on the paint bottle) to set the paint.

Then it's time to sew them together! Make sure that the upper and lower case letters don't get flipped upside down in relation to each other. I used about a 1/4 inch seam, leaving a gap for turning and filling, and clipped all the corners.

Turning them was pretty easy, but filling wasn't. If I had been using rice, then filling would have been a breeze, but I was using kidney beans and a home-made funnel (from paper--no pictures, sorry) and it took a bit of work to get the bags filled. Be careful not to overfill the bags or you'll have a hard time stitching the gap closed. I did not topstitch around the entire edge of the bags because I felt like that would be a huge pain.

All finished! No logical order to the bags in this picture, just colors. If you click on the picture, you should be able to see the bags in more detail (including the white edges that some of the letters ended up with).

My daughter loves them and I'm pleased with how they turned out. I may make a few more later on so that she has extra letters to spell her name and other common words.

~Regina