Noob's nap mat

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about a nap mat that I made for Littles to take to preschool  It worked perfectly! She ended up using it until just a few months ago, when we stopped having her nap at school.

Between first trimester fatigue, the holidays, our China travels, and sewing Noob's training pants stash, I didn't have time to make a nap mat for Noob before he started preschool, so he's been sleeping on Littles' mat. But pink ballerinas aren't really "him," so I always planned to make him a new mat as soon as I had some time.

Let the record show that I originally planned to make this using a bunch of fleece from the great Joann's remnant bin sale of about a year ago, since I really need to use it up! But Noob is obsessed with trains as of late, so just before I started sewing the mat, my husband said, "Hey, why don't you do a train theme?"  That meant scrapping the remnant bin fleece I had gotten for cheap and had around the house in favor of buying expensive licensed Thomas the Tank Engine fleece (since, oddly, it's very hard to find train fleece that does not feature Thomas) -- but what can I say. My husband made me do it!

I made this in basically the same way that I did Littles' nap mat (documented extensively in the other post), with a few minor changes, which I'll get to later. The end result...

Bottom of the nap mat and straps: Royal blue fleece (I was able to use some from the great remnant bin sale here)

Top of the nap mat: Flannel

Pillowcase: Thomas the Tank Engine woven cotton. (I got this a while back as part of a bigger fabric order, figuring I'd find some use for it!) I used my serger on this, rather than doing French seams like I had to do on Littles' nap mat in my pre-serger days -- sooooooooo much faster.

Blanket: Thomas the Tank Engine fleece, from Joann's

Here's a close-up of the pillow and top of the blanket. I made the blanket a little longer than I did with Littles', so it can come up and over the pillow a bit. But I didn't attach it to the side of the nap mat at the top, so it can fold down, as shown here (and above).

Rolled up...

The light blue piece is a shoulder strap -- a new feature I added on this one. It's just a single layer of fleece, about a yard long. I thought that might be too short, but if anything, it's too long. It's very thin, by design: It lies under the mat when it's unrolled, so I didn't want there to be a big bump when Noob lay down. I don't love it, but it works OK for now, and it'll be easy enough to cut off in the future if I decide I really hate it.

Close-up of the name tag:

The light blue is fleece again. Gahhhh, this picture makes it look like the edges are really crooked -- I promise they're not that bad in person. For the tag itself, I used printable fabric that I got on clearance at Joann's a while back. It's canvas material that you can stick in your inkjet printer and print on directly. It's not supposed to be washed, so we'll see if we remember to always unsnap the tag before washing :) If not, no big deal, it's easy enough to make another one of these.

By the way, the picture is of Noob riding on a high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing :)

Overall, not my best work. You can't really tell from the pictures, but I had serious trouble sewing straight lines, for some reason! So there are a lot of places where the mat is kinda cockeyed. But it's definitely usable, and most importantly, Noob loves it. OK, he might not look like he's loving it in these action shots, but trust me, he was super excited about his new "choo-choos."