Sunday 11 June 2017

Sewing for a baby

No, not mine 😉. A colleague of mine is due to have their first baby soon (so exciting!). To celebrate, I've done a bit of unselfish sewing. They kept the gender of their baby a mystery so gender neutral was required. I knew I wanted to create something but I wasn't sure what so internet searches commenced (Pinterest here). I had popped down to my local Spotties recently and spied a bunch of lovely fleeces. Great colours and prints and so easy to care for. I put that in the mix and came up with a floor blanket. I fell in love with a poplin with a great mix of greens and aqua with just a touch of pink,. So using that as the backing fabric, I chose a mint green minky. And to up the ante a little, I also found some nice muslin to make a wrap. Luckily I found some striped bias that complemented the backing fabric for the blanket to bind the wrap edges.

I wasn't sure how sewing minky and poplin together would go so a bit of Internet research on that came up with a few pointers:

  • Use fabric spray adhesive to baste the fabrics together
  • Secure the edges to be sewn with pins spaced 1" apart
  • Use a slightly longer straight stitch
  • Top stitching will provide a nice finish

I used to poplin width to set the size of the rug at 1.2m square. I used the triangle method and checked with my quilting square. The minky was wider than this. So I used the poplin as the template for the minky.

Using spray adhesive made a huge difference. The minky slipped around like crazy! And I've never used so many pins! I used a longer stitch (3 on my pfaff) for both the seams and the top stitching, which I put 1/4" in from the edge.


The wrap was pretty straightforward. Again, I used the width of the fabric to determine its size. I then used a glass to create curved corners. I wrapped the edges with the bias, pinned both sides together and sewed. I took care with the pinning, especially around the curves, and it turned out beautifully. The trick with bias on the curves is to keep the fold, on the fabric edge, as taut as you can, whilst easing any excess at the stitching line.


I managed to finish both the rug and wrap in time to present at her baby shower. They were very happily accepted. 😍