More Preparations for the Animal Cracker!

My mom and dad and sister came up to visit last weekend and I was so excited for them to see the new studio.  Whenever they come we have projects planned, and the two big ones for this weekend were to build the design wall and to build a cutting table.  I’ll have some happy posts about that wonderfulness early next week.  But while Mike and Dad built the design wall, my mom and Becky and I did some sewing projects.
Our main project for the baby was to use my Mom’s serger to make some big swaddling/receiving blankets and some flannel burp cloths.  These have been popping up everywhere lately, but I got the idea from talking to the fabulous Kenda who’s also expecting soon.  She really liked homemade simple flannel receiving blankets for her first son since they’re bigger than the ones you can usually get.  She also said that flannel burp cloths were pretty absorbent.  So off we went to Hancock's for some fun coupon-eligible flannels.
After washing the fabric, we cut big, square, single thickness pieces out of the flannel for the blankets.  We just rounded the corners and serged  the edges and they were finished!  For the burp cloths we layered two thicknesses of flannel and serged around those edges.  What easy projects to give such cute results!  Becky even practiced swaddling on the life-sized Martha doll my mom made me when I was little.



We mad five blankets, two out of the mushroom fabric and one out of everything else.  I think  Becky’s favorite was the aliens, but I really love the animals and the sharks.


Here are the burb cloths


In addition to the blankets/burp cloths, we made (after great trial and tribulation) a little fabric book.  It’s made out of a preprinted fabric panel Becky and I snagged off a sale bolt last fall and we finally put it together.  I really liked it since it featured a pretty adorable mouse.  Alas it turned into a  comedy of errors from beginning to end.  To make it more difficult there were no instructions or page numbers (although there was a story of sorts), so it was hard to tell how to assemble it.  Really though, all you had to do was cut out and sew the pages together.  We started late at night (thinking it would be easy) but I can’t tell you how many we cut wrong, how many wrongly sized interfacings we cut out, or how many times we had to rip out all the stitching holding to (wrong) pages together.  There was MUCH frustration and MUCH laughing.  You would not believe how much trouble 3 reasonably competent sewers had assembling this thing.  But in the end, we got it and it’s pretty cute.












It was so wonderful to have my family out and I was so sad when they had to leave.  We had such a good time and had so much fun enjoying each other’s company.  Hopefully we’ll all gather again soon when the baby comes!