Baby gifts

Finally for a reason why in the last post I said that I have had only something small here in the blog. At least those feel small to me; the belt didn't take that long, the curtain was needed and fun but nothing special in it, the top for my daughter was just basic sewing etc. No tutorials, no interesting upcycles... That's how it feels to me, I have set some standards for myself and all of these are below those standards. Maybe not the belt, that was actually quite cool to understand you can make one yourself!

Our kids got a new cousin in August and now that they are a bit older and I actually have some sewing time I almost lost my head when thinking about what to make as a baby gift! What I ended up is less than half of what I was thinking of!

I mean, there are so many things you can sew for a baby and all of them are just way too cute to miss. And then all those little clothes! You don't need to think if the baby wants to wear them as you have to when the kids have an opinion of themselves. Just know something about how the mum feels about baby clothing (yeah, usually it is still a mum who decides about this...) and you are good to go.

As a new baby present I ended up doing this:

Car seat bag for an autumn baby so she can travel comfortably in a car during the cold weather. My daughter's Baby Born-doll is showing how it works; put a baby inside, close the seat belts, zip the bag. During the winter the babies need warm clothes and that means also thick clothes, especially when you compare to the size of the baby. It's more comfortable when you can close the seat belts over less clothing than over thick ones.

Also you can open this easily in the car when it is warm enough as well as for example in the grocery store. You don't want to wake up sleeping baby, at least if you have some grocery shopping to be done. So, just take your baby in her car seat, open the car seat bag and she can continue her sleeping undisturbed.

I didn't know what kind of car seat the family had and obviously couldn't ask so I made it fit to any car seat. Just asked some measurements from other parents and made it easy to use even with 5-point seat belts. It needed some thinking over but I'm quite happy with the result. There will be full car seat bag tutorial later on.

Good thing with the bag is that you can use it just like any other sleeping bag in a pram with belts too, it should work with those as well. I hope the family finds lots of use for this one.

The little girl got a name yesterday and was baptized, also an occasion to bring gifts. Naturally, self made through and through from us.

Worry eater of course, small baby boots, self made card and because they were hard to wrap self made present bag too. For the boots I made pattern myself out of the ones our daughter got as a baby. Also tutorial for those coming up and I try to make printable pattern too but we will see.

These were fun to make and even though they aren't really upcycles (except the worry eater of course), I will share the tutorials here too. I wish I had known how easy it is to make cool baby accessories myself when our kids were babies.

The new families often have tight budget, new baby needs so many things and here are couple things you can make yourself and with very low budget if you want to. Just upcycle some fabrics you already have and you have something that costs tens of euros in the shops! I will share some tips for doing this when making the tutorials.

More upcycled worry eaters!

After my last post about our summer time and short break because of summer trips finally something I have actually done! I have mentioned before how Finns tend to get crazy when it becomes summer and every town and village have their own summer events and fests. Our little village is no exception, our summer event lasted whole week with casual sport events, market etc. There were also small group of volunteers who opened a season shop for that week filled with local products. Potatoes and other farm products, crafts etc. I also made something, could have made more but the time was short with holiday trips and all other duties. I decided to make worry eaters and got together eight of them.

Four are the size I made the original one (here) and four are slightly smaller because the size of the clothes I upcycled for these. They are, of course, upcycled; zips, buttons and fabric comes from old clothes. For the filling I used new cotton wool. I didn't think it would be such a good idea to use old cotton wool from old pillows. Think about the sweat and grease the pillows might have absorbed! No washing can take it out of them, so new it was instead of upcycled.

I used knit fabrics to make them nicely soft and cuddly and of course saved the extra parts from the clothes I used.

This one was a small ballerina body and I cut the front part from the body's front part with the star, placing it on the side rather than in middle. Ears and eye background are from scrap fabric, the body itself is soft jersey.

My favourite worry eater! For this I used old adult pants made out of soft velour. There is still plenty of this fabric left for many other projects, the adult pants have so much fabric for upcycling purposes! Again, the rest is from my scrap box.

Green terry hoodie with bright pink zip and wristbands turned out to something more harmonic with green zip and yellow ears and eyes. Terry is elastic, very comfortable for a toy like this. Yellow fabric is out of old baby body.

Sometimes it is some small detail that makes you happy. In this case it is the zip. I had a sweatshirt blouse with grey sleeves (the fabric in ears) and I found a zip with matching colour from my storage! I like this one too because the fabric is sturdier than jersey and gives whole more feeling to a toy than jersey.

However, jersey works great for the smaller ones. For the the pink I used sleeveless summer top in size 104. From the shirts at this size you make easily the bigger one but then you need to have sleeves for the hands and ears. The blue one is t-shirt in size 104, also the missing long sleeves made it impossible to make the bigger one. Also the fabric is 100% viscose and very soft, I doubt it would have worked well with the big one.

For these I used old baby clothes, the left one is out of pants, the right one out of a body. Even the small baby clothes make great small worry eaters!

I have to say that if (or when) I will make more worry eaters for sale I will not make the fingers and toes! It would save me easily 15 min/worry eater - at least. I sold three of these in the season shop during that week, quite well when you think that these were the only things I had for sale, the shop was open only for a week and it was in a small village, not next to a busy shopping street in a city. Right after the week I sold two more so only three left!

I also made small notes with my email and blog addresses so someone interested could take a card and maybe contact me later.

I also had an explanation what these are, what they are made of and a mention that I can make something out of old favourite clothes, great keepsake! That's why I made these cards too, easy to grab into your wallet. The box is, of course, upcycled. I got a shower gel in a pretty box, this is the cover. It was quite pretty but the surface had suffered some damage in the bathroom so I covered the edges and the bottom:

It was just right for this use!

Altogether; 8 pieces of clothes used, same amount of zips and 16 buttons, not bad! If you took a look at my working room, you wouldn't notice it though, it is still too full!

And... if you want to make your own, I have a post about making your own worry eater with full tutorial: http://upcyclelina.blogspot.fi/2016/04/worry-eater-tutorial.html