Baby Shower Gifts: Embellished Onesies

I love baby showers. I really do. Especially the kind where you just kind of hang out and chit chat and swap pregnancy/birth/motherhood stories and eat yummy food and ooh and aah over the decorations and cute presents and favors. Those are my favorite. Tonight I got to attend one such shower and had a fabulous time. Two gals were being honored tonight, one who's due with her 3rd boy in about a week and another who's expecting her 3rd girl towards the end of November. Cool, huh?

Of course making baby stuff is a real treat for me, so I thoroughly enjoyed spending this afternoon creating some one-of-a-kind onesies to gift to my fellow expectant mommys. I did something similar a while back for another friend's shower and had such a good time with it then that I thought I'd try it again. ( I have to say, Pinterest came in real handy when I was looking for ideas. Do you Pinterest yet?)

As usual I started with a couple packs of white onesies, but this time I bought those kimono-style tees as well because they're just so stinking cute. Here's the boy batch which includes...

... an appliqued elephant...

... a gray linen whale with tiny button eye...

... a creeping button caterpillar...

... and a dapper polka dotted bow tie.

The girl batch included...

... a strip of lace with some mother-of-pearl buttons down the center...

... a floral birdy...

... white eyelet ruffle trim...

... and a pink knit ruffle.

And just for a little humor, each one got one of these as well. (In case you can't tell, these are appliqued to the backside.)



I wish I'd had time to take a picture of them packaged, but I was in a little bit of a rush. All I did was roll up each onesie and tie it with some twine. I had some little tin buckets and filled them with the onesies, then attached a tag to the handle with a pink or blue ribbon.

I had so much fun making these- hope my friends like them, too!

Tutorial: Make a thrift store sweater hot water bottle cover

Wow- that title is a mouth full. I might have to re-think that. In the meantime, here's a little tutorial to show you how I made a cozy for my hot water bottle.

Today during a blissful two hours of only having 1/3 of my kids to tote around with me, I popped into another thrift store and hunted for a great wool sweater to use for this project. I found a great sweater! Just not wool.
It was a ramie/cotton blend, but I couldn't resist that fair isle design and the lovely embroidery on the chest. It reminded me of a sweater my Dad brought back from Norway decades ago.


I ignored the fact that there was a zipper smack in the middle of the top half, and because it was 50% off I figured that it couldn't hurt to try and make it work.

Here's how I did it:

Make a template.
Start by tracing your water bottle onto a piece of paper. (Please ignore the circle punch.)

Cut about 1/4" away from your line. (I folded my template in half before I started cutting to ensure that both sides would be identical.)


Since my sweater had that zipper, I had to start by ripping it out...

...then stitching the two sides together.

Place your template on your sweater in whatever way is pleasing, incorporating the elements of the sweater that are most attractive. Try to place it as straight as possible with the "grain".
Pin the template to the sweater.
Cut.

For the back piece, fold your template in half width-wise to give you a visual idea of where about halfway is.
Lay your template along the bottom edge of your sweater so that you have about 1"-1.5" between the bottom of the hem and your new halfway fold line.
Pin and cut.

Repeat the last step with the top half of your template, this time adding a little more distance between the halfway line and the hem. (Mine was about 3".)


Because I was working with a non-felted sweater, I chose to serge the edges of each piece to keep them from unravelling. If you don't have a serger you could probably just zig zag along the edges instead. This step isn't necessary if you use a sweater that's good and felted, though.

Take your shorter back piece and place it wrong side up onto your template, matching the edges.

Place the longer back piece on top of this (also wrong side up) matching the edges with the paper template.
Pin the two pieces together where they overlap.
Stitch the two pieces together on each side.

Lay your back and front pieces together with right sides facing and pin.

Stitch all the way around, pausing where the hems on the back pieces are and taking some back stitches to reinforce them.
Turn your cover right side out through the gap in the back piece and slip it onto your water bottle.


In theory, this should help to keep the water in the bottle warm longer by providing some insulation, as well as making it more comfortable by keeping the rubber off your skin.

It's also much, much cuter this way. :)

Easy photo gift idea

This weekend I went to a baby shower for a neighbor friend of mine, and until the night before I'd only planned to give her a pair of baby shoes as a gift. Then I came across an idea online that I wanted to try to recreate myself.

I'd seen where some vintage blocks were used to spell out the baby's name and were accompanied by some adorable miniature animal toys. The little display was then photographed and sold for $18 per print. As much as I would have loved to give her one of those darling prints framed and ready to be hung in her nursery, I didn't have the time as her shower was the very next afternoon.

Instead I got up the next morning and dug through my kids' baskets of toys until I'd found all the blocks that we own, and set up my own little photography session by a big window in my dining room.

Here's the original photo I ended up using. I used a large sheet of white paper on a dining room chair as my backdrop. I put my camera on the Macro setting (the little flower symbol) and kept my overhead lighting and flash off. I just used what was coming through my east facing window. As you can see in the lower left corner, I accidentally got a little bit of the chair in the shot. Grrr.

First I used Picasa to edit the photo. Here's what the photo looks like after using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" basic fix feature.

Then I used the Glow effect to make it look a little softer.

I cropped out that annoying sliver at the bottom...

... then used Photoscape to add a pretty vignette around the edges.

I ordered an 8x10 print with WalMart.com and picked it up in an hour at my local store. I was in too big a hurry to take a photo of the finished project, but I ended up "matting" it with some purple fabric from my stash in the same way I'd done these for my son's room.


A white 10x13 frame that I already had made the whole thing turn out nicely. I may just have to do this with my own kids' names! I really like the idea of putting special toys in the photo as well, so if you try this look around to see what items you can add to the photo for a personal touch.

I think it's safe now

Now that Christmas is over and presents have been unwrapped, I can finally share with you the projects that I made for my family! The ones below are items that got sent to my siblings (minus one because I forgot to take a photo before I shipped it. Der.)

My older brother and his wife got a set of hand embroidered pillow cases (nice ones, too, I might add) with each of their monograms. I sent them in a nice keepsake box, which I also forgot to photograph, with the saying "Always kiss me goodnight" on the lid.

For my younger brother and his fiance I made them this fabric applique portrait of their rat terrier, Molly, from a photo of when she was a puppy. It was kind of tedious and a little time consuming, but I think it turned out pretty well. Here's the tutorial that I based the project on.

My youngest brother got a baseball cap ear warmer from this tutorial. I was originally going to make him a custom camera strap from a couple of his old ties, but I later learned that he was no longer using the camera it was intended for, so I had to scrap that idea. I admit, it took me quite a while to come up with something else. 22-year-old boys are so hard to make stuff for!

The idea for my younger sister's gift came to me when I tried to lay down for a nap one day. I didn't have a tutorial to go by, so I had to wing it. It was pretty simple, aside from my stupid presser foot sticking to the leather with every blasted top stitch.

The awesome wood button came from this Etsy seller, and her initial I just scratched into the leather using a large upholstery needle.

Inside pockets for pens, pencils, iPod, wallet, etc. Just the thing for a girl who is always writing and/or drawing, but doesn't carry a purse.

And finally, my youngest sister received this hat and mitten set that I made from a thrifted wool sweater. I actually made a couple of these but this one seemed most appropriate for her since red and white happen to be her high school colors. Here's the tutorial I used.