Tag: baby

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More on Making a Quilt from Baby Clothes

Kara Hartz3 Comments

The friendly quilters over at TheQuiltShow.com gave me wonderful advice about how to begin my quilt made from baby clothes. I was concerned because almost all the baby clothes are knits, and will be easy to stretch during sewing. Their advice: Use a fusible interfacing as a stabilizer to prevent stretching.

It’s worked wonderfully so far. Here’s the first block I made:

I wanted the quilt to use a variety of traditional star blocks. I picked this block to start with because it had a nice big center square where I could fit one of the cute applique embellishments from a toddler shirt. A lot of the clothing has appliques like this that I want to include, and I can this way. The fusible interfacing worked great. I bought the lightest weight interfacing I could find. The clothes are already a heaver fabric than the normal 100% quilting cotton I normally use, so I didn’t want to add any more weight than necessary.

I bet this will be a very nice soft, warm quilt by the time it’s done. I still can’t quite close the drawer that I’m storing old baby clothes in, plus the little one is about ready to go up a clothing size again, so I’d better get going on this project!

Have you ever made a quilt from baby clothes? If so, share your tip in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Making scrap quilts out of old baby clothes

Kara Hartz7 Comments

I’ve been saving old baby clothes for years now, with the plan to turn them into a quilt someday. I decided to only save clothes that were torn or stained so I couldn’t give them away for someone else to use, or if an item had a lot of sentimental value.

I now have a drawer full of clothes, so I think it’s time to get serious about making that baby clothes quilt!

I’ve seen a lot of scrap quilts that I like the look of. The problem is that most that I like have small pieces that are all the same size. Small pieces are good for small baby clothes, but many of the clothes I saved have cute applique or other images on them that aren’t all that small. I was looking for a quilt pattern that would let me use mostly small pieces, and some larger ones.

Today I found this website:
http://www.ufo-rphanage.com/scrap_quilts.shtml

So many quilt pattern sites have old, out-dated, non-functioning links that it can get very frustrating to search for quilt patterns. One or two on the UFO website were dead links, but the rest were a gold mine!

So far, this is the pattern I’m leaning toward:
http://www.ezquilt.com/patterns/oldfashioned/oldfashioned.htm

Although, I think I may make my blocks slightly bigger than this pattern calls for. I like that I can use a bigger piece (like the pictures I want to save) for the center of the blocks, and then use up all the tiny pieces from sleeves, etc. for the rest. You need to use a little imagination to picture a scrappy finished quilt in color, but the picture in my head looks cool.

If you have a favorite scrap quilt pattern, share it here! I can’t seem to part with my scraps, so I’ll always be looking for great scrap quilt patterns!

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Irish Chain Doll Quilt

Kara Hartz1 Comment

I’ve been doing some sewing for my kids to get ready for Christmas. I love how this doll quilt turned out so much I have to show it off to the cyber-world.

It’s a basic Irish Chain pattern. The small squares are 1 inch each, and the full quilt is 21 inches by 27 inches. I used a layer of flannel for batting to keep it from becoming too bulky and keep a miniature quilt look to it. I think it turned out to be a good choice, and our little dollies will be so snugly under it.

It makes me wish I’d made a full sized version. Maybe someday I will. In the meanwhile, I’m considering making another one to put in my Etsy shop. I have that quilt section in my shop that has been empty for far too long. A doll quilt still counts!

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Easy to Make Baby Shoes that are Cute too!

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I wanted to write this blog a long time ago, but I never got around to taking pictures of the shoes I made. Now that my daughter has outgrown them, I can’t find what I did with them. So still no pictures to share.

Ah well. I loved making them so much, and they were so nice to have, I’m going to blog about this free soft baby shoe pattern anyway.

The baby shoe pattern was created by Stardust Shoes, and they are both darling, and simple to sew. Even if you’re a beginning sewer, you can make these shoes.

Now I didn’t exactly follow the directions (I’m not normally a troublemaker, but I am lazy, and I don’t do things that I can get away with not doing). Also, I was not trying to make shoes that would last. I knew my daughter wouldn’t be wearing the shoes I made for very long, so I didn’t worry about cutting corners a little. While the shoes I made turned out very nice, and actually held up very well, if you plan to put them to serious use, or want them to last awhile, I recommend following the pattern’s directions more closely.

I didn’t use the bonded fleece for the sole; I just used canvas for the whole outside of one pair, and vinyl for another pair. I lined both pairs of baby shoes with flannel, and didn’t bother with any interfacing since both the fabrics I was using were fairly thick. I liked how the fleece made the insides soft and cozy. The vinyl pair of baby shoes was cute, but probably wouldn’t have been a good choice for a baby that was beginning to walk, as I think they may have been a little slick on the bottoms.

Soft baby shoes were much easier to make than I thought they would be. If you’ve ever been tempted to try it, download the free baby shoe pattern and give it a try. If you like the look of these dhows, but don’t want to make your own, I know several great EtsyKids sellers have some really adorable baby shoes in their Etsy Shops.

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Why It’s Important to Prewash Fabric

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Especially for Projects for Kids and For Quilts.

I use 100% cotton fabric for almost all my sewing. I just really like it. Occasionally I’ll use a blend or another kind of fabric if it’s something sentimental for personal use. Some fabric requires special care, or dry cleaning. I’m not talking about those fabrics in this post – I just don’t know enough about them. But cotton fabrics, quilting fabrics, cute novelty prints, etc all should be washed first, and here’s why:

There’s lots of tips out there for quilters about the importance of pre-washing fabrics. Different fabrics may shrink at different rates, even if they’re all 100% cotton. If you want your quilt that you’ve spent hours and weeks and months making to hold up over time, you don’t want different parts to shrink and other parts not to, thus pulling or distorting the quit, even tearing it in extreme cases.

While this is an excellent reason to pre-wash all your fabrics, it isn’t the most important reason, in my opinion.

When fabrics are made, all kinds of chemicals are used during production, and dying. The chemicals treat the fabrics, and help the colors stay true, and generally assist in production at many stages. However, those chemicals are still there when the finished bolt goes out to stores. The most famous of these is formaldehyde, but other chemicals are used too.

There is no way I want to snuggle under a quilt full of formaldehyde and other chemicals. And there is sure as heck no way I’m letting my child snuggle under that quilt or play with a toy that hasn’t had the chemicals washed out of it.

While it may sound too easy that all you have to do to get rid of these horrible chemicals is throw the fabric in the wash, that’s really all the experts say you need to do. In all my research, every authority and expert I’ve found says that as bad as these substances are, washing gets rid of them. It’s that simple.

So while it may be a bit time consuming, and, yes, it may require a little bit of pressing if the fabric wrinkles, it’s just too important a step to skip. If you are making something that a baby may possibly put in their mouth, (like everything I make) please, PLEASE, PLEASE pre-wash your fabrics.

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I Spy Forever

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I think I’ve made it clear by now that I love I spy quilts. I’ve loved them since I was a little girl snuggled under the quilt my grandma made. So I don’t know why it should surprise me that my girls love them to. Maybe there is something universally appealing about all those neat pictures and patterns.

I made a twin sized I spy quilt for my first born when she moved from her baby bed to her big girl bed. My second daughter is still in her crib, and will be for quite awhile, but I’m already planning quilts for her too. I’d imagined that I’d make her something different. Couldn’t decide what exactly, but just different.

Then yesterday we were playing on big sister’s bed and she was just fascinated with the I spy quilt. We often play with the smaller I spy security blankets I made for her, and she just loves that. But the big bed quilt was even more amazing to her. She would point at a square and look at me waiting for me to tell her what the picture was. I was surprised how long she stayed focused and kept wanting to play (although I shouldn’t have been).

I think she’ll be getting her own I spy quilt one day too. Different is overrated when the good old stuff still brings in so much fun.

I’m actually working on an alphabet quilt for big sister now. It’s taking a while because I got the hot idea to find fabric with pictures for each letter (apple print for A, Blue fabric for B, etc.) Turns out some letters are a bit tricky to find. So that can be my fun and different quilt to make for now. Baby sister will get a different quilt too one day. It’s fun making new kinds of quilts, and no matter how careful we are, everything still needs to be washed from time to time. But the I spy is a necessity in this house.

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The Quilted I-Spy Sceurity Blanket

Kara Hartz1 Comment

When I was little, I remember laying in bed and studying all the different pictures, prints, and fabrics on my bed quilt. Some zigzag lines in orange and blue. Little girls in hats – there were several different versions of this same print, each with a different accent color. Then there were some solid colored squares. Even though there weren’t that many different patterns, I loved to look at them over and over again.

So I blame my grandmother, who made that quilt, for instilling the love of patchwork in me. The only thing that could have made me love that quilt more would have been even more neat fabrics to look at.

When I had my own baby, I was a fairly new quilter myself. I started collecting neat prints so that I could make her a bed quilt with as many different fabrics as possible. The one I made her has literally hundreds of pictures. And she loves it.

But, I also wanted something simple we could play baby games with. Learn colors. Make animal sounds, and learn animal names. Play peekaboo. The idea for the I spy security blanket was born.

I always include one square each of the basic colors. Colors are easy to learn, and babies love to show off when they know where the red square is. I think it breaks up all the prints to throw in some solid spaces too. The other squares are full of as many different, bright, fun prints as I can find. The easiest way to cut squares is with a rotary cutter, but I just can’t settle for that all the time. With larger prints, it’s too easy to get only the bottom half of an animal – or just an ear. What fun is that? The extra time and effort it takes to carefully cut out specific images from fabric, so that I get a perfectly centered animal, or truck, or whatever, is what makes these so special. I really love the way they look in the end.

Because they are so small, only twenty inches square, they would be to bulky with batting in them, so they aren’t true quilts. Yet two layers of thin cotton would be flimsy, so I use flannel for the backing. It’s soft, and provides just the perfect weight. Then I go ahead and stitch around each block, just like it really is a quilt. Those extra stitches let my blankets stand up to all kinds of rough treatment, and wash after wash after wash.

I keep thinking I should make new blankets for my new baby, but the ones I made four years ago are still in great shape. They aren’t just used for peekaboo anymore though. They’re superhero capes, and baby doll blankets. Something new everyday it seems at times.

And that’s why I love to make them.

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My 15 Minutes

Kara Hartz2 Comments

Parents Magazine (yes THE Parents magazine) did a little blurb on Etsy, and included my Soft Fabric Animal book.
Excuse me for a moment while I do a happy dance.

*dances*

Yep – I’m kinda excited.
The other items are cool too. I actually just bought some toys from Stumppondtoy for my kids. His shop has been on my favorite list for awhile now.

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Baby Cold Medicine

Kara Hartz2 Comments

Sadly, I wasn’t surprised to hear this story on the radio this morning:
http://www.kcbs.com/Infant-Cold-Meds-Pulled-From-Shelves/1079962

About a month ago, my baby had a cold. My pediatrician told me years ago with my first born that there were no safe cold medicines for babies, so when I saw “Infant Cold and Cough” medicine in the pharmacy I was happily surprised. It had a picture of an infant in diapers on the package and all. “They must have found a safe baby medicine!” I excitedly told myself.

Now, at the time I was in the unusual, and fortunate circumstance to be shopping alone, so I took the time to read the back of the package. “Not for children under 2 years old”.
Sorry. I thought it was for “Infants” as displayed in the title. Since when did 2 year olds qualify as infants?

I’m sure that had I had my two wonderful, yet distracting children, I would have bought the medicine without reading the fine print. Yes, I would have read the dosing instructions before giving it to my baby and then would have seen I couldn’t use it, (and been damn mad that I’d been tricked into buying it!) I’m not excusing the parents who didn’t bother to read instructions or who changed the dosage they were supposed to give, but I think the drug companies are obviously trying to be deceitful in their marketing.

After I returned the package to the shelf, I saw there were many other brands (probably all part of this recall now) that had similar deceptive labeling. The Bold front packaging implying or outright stating that the medicine was for babies, and only in the fine print in the rear do they admit it really isn’t.

Not cool.

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Learning Something New

Kara Hartz2 Comments

I decided I want to learn to draw. I used to draw when I was young, and don’t really remember why I stopped.

treasurefield on Etsy reccomended the book “Drawing with Children” to me as a good beginning drawing book. I’m a little bumed because I got it on an interlibrary loan and so they won’t let me renew it and I’m only about 1/3 the way through. Due today.

Anyhow, I wasn’t very happy with the drawings I made as I worked on the exercises in the book, so last night I decided I’d break the ‘rules’ (or at least the suggestions in my book) and just draw something I was interested in. Sneaking over to my baby’s crib, and using what I learned so far, I drew this:

Sleeping Baby
Sleeping Baby

I broke another guideline too. The book reccomends that beginners use a felt tiped pen to draw so they can’t worry about fixing mistakes – they just have to keep drawing. But I used a pencil, and erased a lot before I was satisfed with how it looked. I would have quit before finishing if I couldn’t erase, I think. It really is a great book though, I’m glad I did those exercises or else I wouldn’t have been brave enough to even try drawing a person.

Maybe not the Mona Lisa, but for my first drawing that I did on my own, I’m proud of my little old self. I really like how the ear turned out.