I might be crafty... please don't tell anyone.

I threw a shower a few weeks ago for our friends, Rebecca and James.  They are expecting a baby boy in late October and we couldn't be more excited.  We met them when we moved to Seattle and when we left our apartment building and bought our house, Becca & James ended up buying in our neighborhood.... yeah I talked it up... of course I wanted them as neighbors! 

Since Bec is having a boy, I now get to immerse myself in all things blue.... cute clothes with bugs, pirates and dinosaurs.  Now Kasen has alot of stuff like that too.... gotta start them young with science... but with a boy you can go all out on the boy wear.  I mean baby VANS shoe socks... seriously.

In celebration, I got out my dusty sewing machine to make a few things.  My first project was a tag blanket.  A friend of mine at PEPS said her son LOVED his tag blanket and on inspection, I decided I could probably make one.  Here is the final product:

The front is flannel (yes with Dinosaurs) and the back is Minky (a super soft fabric that is made from recycled plastic - super popular in baby stuff right now).  The minky was a touch hard to sew with, but I love the soft feel it gave the blanket.  I found this on-line tutorial that shows nice instructions for a similar blanket.  FYI - be sure to pre-wash all fabrics.  While Minky doesn't do alot of shrinking, the flannel will.

My example tag blanket had tags that were fabric (not ribbon like in the tutorial) and some were "crinkly".  I wanted to add this as well, so I made some fabric tags with plastic in the middle.  The plastic is from the wipes that we use (hooray reuse).  If you wanted to spend money... cellephane you bought for gifts would work nicely.  Below you can see some of the different tags:



The orange tag is one of my fabric "crinkly" tags and the others are ribbon.  I tried to pick varying patterns and textures.  Babies are drawn to strong contrast, so the black & white seemed best.  It was actually a pretty fun project....  my Grandma Knickerbocker (the seamstress in my family) would be so proud.

Headed to Michigan tomorrow, so posts will be coming from my phone (I hope).  If this works, I will have to tell Karl he was right (again) since he convinced me to buy the phone.  Success may be a mixed blessing.