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."

Snow White costume

Yep, I'm still here.

I know I haven't posted in over a month. I've spent the last month 1) moving houses and 2) sewing Littles' Halloween costume. I think the first was more time consuming, but it's really a close call :)

Anyway, we're in the new house now, and good news! I now have a dedicated space for sewing :) (In the old house, my sewing area was in our guest room -- and we have guests frequently, so I had to take a sewing break or move my sewing stuff elsewhere on a regular basis. Not to mention the fact that guests had to find someplace to squeeze there stuff amidst all my fabric.) Bad news, I haven't had any time to set it up yet, so I'm still not sewing again. One of these days.

As for the Halloween costume, that did get finished, in time for the big day.

For those of you who aren't intimately familiar with the Disney Princesses (lucky!), this is Snow White. The pattern is Simplicity 2817, which is the official licensed one. I made a size 5 for Littles, who normally wears a 4T, and it fits fine with some room to grow.

The fabric is all Symphony broadcloth from Joann's. This is the cheapest kind of broadcloth that Joann's carries, and if I were to do this again, I think I'd use the next "step up." The Symphony stuff really does feel kinda thin and cheap. Because it is, I guess :)

Despite using the cheapie broadcloth, all the fabric cost about $20, which is about as much as a ready-to-wear Snow White dress! But this does include some nice extras, like the cape. (Which Littles has started wearing independently of the Snow White dress -- for example, she'll put it over her Silvermist costume and call herself "Super Silvermist!") Besides, those stupid store-bought dresses always start falling apart within days. Even with the cheapie broadcloth, this one is holding up much better.

Good thing, because as I implied earlier, I'm not 100% sure which was more time consuming, moving houses or sewing this costume :) That's a bit of an exaggeration, but really, this did take a while to sew. It wasn't particularly hard, there are just a lot of pieces to cut out and put together. Still, I think the end result was worth it.

I followed the pattern pretty closely, except:

• I used my serger on most seams, rather than my sewing machine. The pattern has a 5/8" seam allowance, so before sewing a seam, I'd draw a line 3/8" from the edge, and serge on that line. The serger adds another 1/4" seam allowance, so that's just right.
  There were only a few non-straight-line raw seams, mostly around the armholes. For those, I had to sew a basting line anyway to do the gathers, so I sewed the basting line at 3/8" in and then tried to serge along the basting line.
• I skipped the collar. I worked on it one night and couldn't figure it out, and I had way too much other stuff going on in my life to spend a ton of time messing with it.
• I used snaps, rather than velcro, to secure the cape to the dress (less likely to shift/come apart), and velcro, rather than a zipper, on the back opening (easier to get on/off independently).
• I goofed initially, and sewed the skirt onto the bodice the wrong way! So the seam was on the outside of the dress. Oops. I had to cut it off and re-serge it. In the process, I think the bodice lost a little of its "definition" -- if you look at a picture of Snow White, the bodice dips down further/more sharply at the front waistline. Also, at certain angles, the piping doesn't seem to match up quite right with the dip in the bodice. I might try to fix it up a bit, but it does look OK as-is, for the most part.

Here are a few more shots...

The headband has been a big hit as well. I don't love it -- I put glue all along the top of the headband to secure the fabric, and you can see the glue line even now that it's dried. I should have just put glue on the bottom of the headband. But anyway, I guess the important thing is that Littles loves it so much that she wants to wear it to school practically every day. And I have a few more of these headbands (I could only find a 3-pack of suitably sized headbands) and plenty more fabric to use to cover them, and these are super easy to make!

Another shot of the cape...

With Noob... I wanted to make him a Dopey costume to match, but simply ran out of time. And this might be the last year I could coerce him into wearing a costume to match his big sister's. Oh well.

So that's that! I'll see you again once my sewing room is set up :)

Large wetbag

Noob's babysitter also watches a little girl, who is 5 days older than Noob. Her mom recently switched to cloth diapers and offered to pay me to sew a large wetbag for her. I used up a bunch of the leftover red cotton fabric from J's crayon wallet for the outside, and some of that big order of girly PUL that I did for the inside. I think it turned out really cute!

Birthday gifts

On Saturday, we attended a joint birthday party for "J," age 3, and "D," age 1. Two different families, but we (along with many of the other invitees) are very close with both of them, so it was wonderful being able to celebrate together!

Both families also happen to have a place of significance in my sewing "life." I wanted to sew gifts for both boys to commemorate that.

J's mom was the one who lent, and eventually sold, her sewing machine to me when I first got started. For J, I made a crayon wallet. I first heard of crayon wallets back in May, from one of my other friends, who had purchased some off Etsy for her kids and nieces. It seemed like the kind of thing that someone would write a tutorial for, and sure enough, some quick web searching turned up this tutorial.

It seemed a little tricky, but the blogger insisted over and over that it really wasn't that hard, so I took her word for it. Indeed, it really isn't hard at all! Once you get started, it quickly becomes clear how it all fits together.

I know that J loves anything with wheels, so I chose a Cars print for him. I actually got both types of fabric (the blue Cars fabric and the contrasting red fabric) at Walmart, of all places! My Walmart recently got rid of their bolts of fabric, but they do have an entire wall of precut 2 yard cotton pieces, including lots of Disney licensed stuff, for fairly reasonable prices ($6 for solids, $8 for licensed prints). I didn't have time to make it out to Joann's, so this worked out well.

The finished product:

The outside, unfolded:

Inside. The pad of paper is from Target, and then I taped on a cover that I made using Cars clip art that I found online:

I love how this turned out and will probably make more of these for future birthdays and other events.

On to D's gift. D's mom is a Texas A&M grad (yes, this is the same D for whom I made an A&M sleep sack as a Christmas present), and D is also the only other cloth diapered baby I know. Now, early last year, immediately following Noob's birth, I really wasn't doing a lot of sewing. I just wasn't into it, with everything else going on. But when D's baby shower rolled around, I decided to sew some A&M wetbags as a gift. That project is what really got me started on sewing again -- and I haven't stopped since :) I recently came across the leftover A&M fabric from the wetbags and decided to use it to sew -- what else? -- a diaper!

The fabric is cotton, so I didn't want to use it directly over a layer of PUL (to prevent wicking issues) and I also knew that D's parents don't use fitteds. I decided to try a pocket with embellished tabs, as I've heard that even cotton works fine on those tabs, since they don't really get wet.

I used the Darling Diapers Unlimited pattern, size medium. I've shown off embellished-tab diapers I've made using this pattern in the past, but here are some pictures for how I actually altered the pattern to do it. I took the idea from this Diaper Sewing Divas tutorial (free registration required), but that uses the La Di Da pattern. For DDU, I followed the same directions to cut off the wings at the line connecting the elastic endpoints (marked by stars):

And I did the same for the wings:

The LDD tutorial talks about trimming the little "tail" that you get when you put the tab pattern on top of the body pattern. For DDU, there are two little "tails" that need to be trimmed, one on top and one on the bottom. See them here?

Final tab pattern with both tails trimmed:

I traced the tab pattern onto vinyl. This allowed me to position the pattern just right on the fabric, because I could see through the pattern. Do you see the shiny vinyl on top in the picture below? The blue dots mark the snap placements (for both a single row and double row of snaps):

Once I have the tabs cut out, I sew them to the body, then proceed with diaper construction as usual.

The final product:

I didn't get the logos placed on the tabs quite as well as I would have liked, but I think it looks OK still!

Inner is suedecloth with a modified welt pocket:

Insert is a Zorb II trifold with serged edges:

Folded up for stuffing into the pocket:

I hope the recipients enjoy these gifts as much as I enjoyed making them!

Kitchen laundry bag

About two years ago, we switched over to using mostly washcloths to clean up spills, hands/faces, etc. around the kitchen. It really cut down on our paper towel usage, and washcloths are so much sturdier for cleaning up the big messes that kids tend to make!

I had been putting the dirty washcloths, along with bibs, dish towels, and other kitchen "laundry," in our regular laundry hamper. But this hasn't been working well. For starters, a lot of kitchen laundry is covered in food, so it attracts ants in our laundry hamper -- gross! Also, a lot of it is wet, so it starts to get stinky after a few days -- again, gross! And when it comes time to wash it, because it's stinky, I prefer to use Tide on it -- I feel like it cleans better than Country Save, which is what I usually use on our clothes. Unfortunately, Noob breaks out in a rash if he wears clothes washed in Tide, so I usually end up washing everything in Country Save, rather than having to pick wet, stinky, food-covered washcloths out of the hamper to launder separately.

I finally got tired of this and decided to make a wetbag just for our kitchen laundry:

Sorry, that's not the greatest picture, but nothing super exciting here. I made this in the same way I make wetbags for use with cloth diapers, following this tutorial. I used a food-themed woven cotton print (from the remnants bin at Joann's) for the outer and white PUL for the inner. The zipper is from my eBay zipper stash. I made the handle snapping so that it could hang from a doorknob or snap around the handle of the oven, refrigerator, etc.

Simple, easy, and very effective! I've been using it all day today and I love it already. It should do a much better job of keeping the stink contained and the ants away!

Diapers for traveling: More serging practice

We're on our long-awaited vacation to Panama! I wanted to bring mostly Best Bottoms along on this trip, because they take up a lot less space than the diapers we usually use. Here are four Best Bottoms diaper changes (a shell with an insert + 3 additional inserts) on the left, next to four of our normal BumGenius diapers on the right:

I have one Best Bottoms shell (the brown one shown above) and had worked out a trade for two more, but unfortunately,the woman I was trading with goofed, and didn't send out the other two shells until just this week -- too late for this trip. Oh well, I'll have them for our next vacation, to Florida in September. In the meantime, I really needed at least one more shell for this trip, so I made one, using the Darling Diapers Unlimited pattern, size medium. The exterior is a 100% polyester print, and the interior is PUL, sewed so that the "shiny" side is exposed so that it can be wiped clean if it gets dirty:

I added snaps to the interior to secure the Best Bottoms inserts. I meant to do it before sewing the diaper together so that I could hide the snaps, but I forgot, so I had to do them so that they're exposed on the diaper exterior, as you see above. Here is a shot of the interior, alone and then with a large size insert:

The sizing of the shell isn't quite right: It's a little too long for medium size inserts, and a little too short for large size inserts. It's also a little wider than it needs to be. I doubt I'll sew another one of these, but if I do, I'll either shorten or lengthen the rise slightly (depending on whether I want to use medium or large inserts with it), and I'll use the DDU pattern without color sides, rather than the pattern with color sides. But we've been using this shell for the past few days on our trip and it is perfectly functional. And really cute, and soft! I have tons more of that dino print (I got 2 yards of it for just $3, from a destash at Top Shelf Fabrics!), so I'm excited to make some other stuff with it.

I also needed more inserts to go with the shells, so I got a lot more practice serging. I'm really starting to love it! It is so much faster than sewing. I made all of these inserts the night before we left, after the kids went to bed, and while packing for the trip -- that's how quickly they come together, thanks to the serger:

The top four are regular inserts and the bottom four are overnight inserts (with snaps on both sides). There is one medium size and three large size inserts of each type. The regular inserts are 3 layers of either bamboo fleece or bamboo/hemp fleece topped with 1 layer of bamboo velour. The overnight inserts are four layers of hemp fleece. All the fabric is from Nature's Fabrics. I made one more the night before the trip, which isn't pictured -- it's 3 layers of bamboo/hemp fleece topped with a layer of suedecloth for a stay-dry feel.

With that number of layers, the regular inserts aren't quite as absorbent as I'd like on their own. They do last about 1-2 hours on Noob, and it's nice having the option to add an overnight insert underneath if I need more absorbency.

These aren't the greatest pictures, but here are some action shots of the shell with a large size insert inside. It's not as trim as the real Best Bottoms shell, but it's fine:

Thanks to all this work, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with my new serger now. Maybe even comfortable enough to try some "real" serged projects when we get home!

Adventures of a rookie... serger?

My birthday was last week and my parents got me a serger! (A Brother 1034D, to be specific, which comes highly recommended at the lower end of the serger price range.) It's a fancy type of sewing machine that cuts, sews, and finishes edges, all in one step, so it can really make sewing a lot faster!

The timing could not have been better, as I need to make a bunch of inserts for Noob's Best Bottoms shells in preparation for an upcoming trip, and inserts are way faster to sew with a serger. As it turns out, inserts are also a perfect first serging project. They sew up quickly, so if you totally mess up, it's not like you've wasted a ton of time. You don't have to be super-precise about sewing the exact right shape; you just have to get in the ballpark. And since the Best Bottoms inserts have contoured edges, rather than being perfectly straight, it gave me some excellent practice sewing some (very gentle) curves, which is definitely tricky on a serger.

Bonus: They actually turned out usable. Here is the first batch I made.

They are five layers of flannel, which is not a whole lot. But I got this flannel for cheap, and it was great practice. Here is one of the inserts inside a Best Bottoms shell. I love how trim this system is. If you haven't seen it before, definitely check out this page, which explains what it's all about. It's pretty clever, easy to use and very economical.

Then I moved on to using old t-shirts. Even cheaper! And I took pictures.

First, I folded the shirt into fourths. This gave me a total of eight layers:

I laid an insert on the t-shirt, making sure that it wasn't covering the shoulder or neck seams. Then I traced it, using a disappearing ink marker so that I wouldn't ruin the original insert:

When I was done tracing, I pushed down on the snaps on the insert. This left little indentations on the shirt, so I would know where to add snaps:

I cut around the inset. This doesn't have to be precise, because as you'll see, the serger will take care of any excess. You can also see here that I've circled where the snaps need to go:

I added the snaps, through the bottom two layers of the insert. I wanted to make this one into an "overnight" insert, which has snaps on the bottom (to snap into the shell) and on the top (to snap in a regular insert, giving double absorbency). So I flipped all the layers over and circled where the other snaps are:

Then I added the snaps. I did sockets on one side (to allow the regular insert, which has studs, to snap in) and studs on the other side (to snap into the shell). Here are my layers with the snaps added... ready to serge!

All done serging! Ready to use! You can see that the serger cut off all the excess fabric -- so easy! This took all of about 15 minutes from start to finish, including taking pictures :)

Here's how it looks with the shell. Overnight insert (with snaps on both sides) on the bottom, regular insert on top. I made the regular insert out of a t-shirt as well and accidentally left a layer with some writing on it on top... oops! Still works fine, just looks funny :)

Here's how it looks on! Still pretty trim considering this is a full 12 layers of fabric.

I love my new toy :) Hopefully by the time I'm done sewing all the inserts I need, I'll feel confident to try it out on some "real" projects!

Sewing for a cause

The organizer of the cloth diaper group here in Dallas recently started up a charity called the DFW Cloth Diaper Project. It aims to provide free cloth diapers (along with education on how to use them) to homeless teen moms in our area. I can't even imagine the challenges that these girls are facing, so if they can not have to choose between food and diapers -- well, that's a small step in the right direction.

So, Fabric.com had a ridiculous blow-out deal on PUL last week. With prices dipping down to just a little over $3/yard, I decided I had to buy a bunch of it. Sadly, it's all girly colors, nothing I want to use on Noob... but I figured it would be perfect for sewing diapers for the charity. I have so much of it that I couldn't possibly sew it all up myself, so I'm hoping to teach some classes on cloth diaper sewing and get some other local ladies working on this. Yeah, me, teaching cloth diaper sewing classes -- it's the blind leading the blind, I tell ya.

Anyway. Once the PUL arrived, I got to work on my first diaper. Of course, I had to try out a new pattern :) This one is the free Sprout Snap pattern. It doesn't come with sewing instructions, but since all diapers sew up pretty much the same, it's easy enough to do if you've sewn a few other diapers before.

The reason I chose this one over the ones I already have is that it's a one size pattern. I kinda prefer sized patterns to use with Noob, in part because I think they're a little trimmer, in part because he'll likely potty train out of the mediums he's wearing now, so they're basically the one size/only size he'll need :). But for this project, obviously it's a lot more efficient to sew a single one-size diaper versus a small diaper, a medium diaper, and a large diaper.

Here it is. PUL outer (from fabric.com), suedecloth inner (Alova suedecloth from Joann's):

You can see the crossover snaps on the wings to allow it to fit a smaller baby:

Hard to see, but that's another welt pocket on the inside:

Of course, I needed a model. Hubby wasn't thrilled with me using Noob to model a pink diaper. Oh well :) He didn't seem to mind!

Noob is on the medium rise setting. One thing I didn't like is that in between the two rise snaps, the PUL sticks out. The snaps keep the sides of the PUL folded under, but in the middle, where there is no snap, it unfolds and points out. This doesn't affect function, but it looks funny. Maybe I'll add a third rise snap in the middle to prevent this.

I didn't topstitch the leg elastic. The pocket is just big enough to fit an insert as it is, so I knew it would be too small if I did a casing. As with the other two pockets I sewed, the inner fabric has a tendency to roll out. (It's always the left leg that does this -- it has to have something to do with the way I'm sewing it.) But those other pockets have been holding up well, despite my fears that the inner rolling out would lead to wicking. So I think it will be OK. And it really is so much easier to sew this way. In this picture, you can see the tan suedecloth rolling out at the leg:

Looking forward to sewing more of these and putting some other babies in cloth!