Buster has been sleeping in a sleep sack we bought in the fall, but he is almost too big for it. Becky suggested making him a bigger one, so we rounded up some old baby blankets and got to work.
The pattern is trivial, but to get it we traced his other sleep sack onto a big piece of white paper, then freehand sketched a bigger size, constrained a little by the size of the blankets we wanted to reuse. The pattern was transferred to blankets and chopped out. Both blankets were gifts from my aunt Susan, the purple one for Violet when she was a baby, the rear pink one was for Millie.
The blankets themselves are fairly worn and a fabric prone to fraying, so we seamed them together with a piece of satin ribbon wrapped around them as a way of finishing the seams. The raw edges at armholes and neck/center also got a binding of ribbon. Becky hand basted all this stuff and I seamed it on the Wheeler & Wilson.
The zipper was a metal one from my bin, with an inner shield made of white flannel. I made up a bottom terminator and top zipper cover from loops of the white ribbon, and crimped on a stainless snap to the top flap.
Buster is sleeping in this now, though probably won't need it for much longer given the warm weather. It ended up kind of too big in the neck area, and is awfully big overall. Millie was having fun trying it out when I finished it, and even Violet could get in with bent legs.
Installing the zipper upsidedown can save you from some of the finishing work involved in making those, and buy a little time against a baby who fidgets with it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip Camilla. Actually his old one had the upside down zipper, which struck me as a clever idea. But the zipper I had to use was a big metal one, so I thought I'd probably want to put a flap over it anyway since it might feel cold on his chin or scratch him. And with the flap in there I guess I felt like I might as well put it in right side up and tack it so that it doesn't come apart fully when the slider is down. The thinking there was that it would save a couple seconds of having to engage the two halves of the zipper in the slider when he is going into it. Anyway, would have been easier to use a plastic zipper installed upside down, as you suggest.
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