My BFF Jin-ju had a baby today! In anticipation of his arrival, I had decided to make some items to welcome Mr. New Baby into the world. I made these a while back but waited until he arrived to post them! I wanted to make him a blanket and maybe a stuffed animal though that sounded real hard. Doing either one required me to borrow or purchase a sewing machine. I decided purchasing was the way to go and now I’m the proud owner of a Brother Something-Or-Other!

I started with the blanket. This was my very first machine-sewing project since Home Ec. class back in middle school so I started with the easiest (and cutest) tutorial I could find. I had a wonderful time picking out the fabric – all the nursery patterns are adorable – and a pretty successful first run! Here’s how it turned out:

The bumps were a little tricky and the seams are 100% uneven and weird but I am still very proud of it! My first attempt successful, I decided to make a stuffed animal. How hard could it be? Jin-ju and I both adore the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place book series so I wanted to make a stuffie of the pet squirrel that the children in that book have. I started by drawing a squirrel on a piece of paper and cutting out two of it. After standing those together, I realized I’d need a front piece too in order for him to have 4 paws.

As you may have already noticed, I didn’t plan ahead well enough for him to have two ears but a one-eared squirrel is still a squirrel so whatever, it’s fine. It’s sorta like a unicorn? Sure! Next step, I had seen this tutorial for watercoloring right on fabric and wanted to try it out, so I grabbed some linen I had on hand and followed the steps to color the traced-pattern pieces in a squirrelly sort of way. It was fun to do and turned out great though I think the colors would have been more distinct had I waited a little longer for them to air-dry before throwing them in the dryer. I cut a little around them, put the default foot back on my sewing machine and (miraculously) sewed it up! I used some embroidery floss to make cute sleepy eyes and stuffed him up!

Look how cute! So cute! I’m so pleased with it. Having the tail be a mostly-separate compartment? So smart!  Getting the legs sewed up? So tricky! I can’t believe it turned out as well as it did! Final touch was a little bow and a name-tag (easily removable for baby safety) 🙂 

Finally, I picked out some illustrations from the Incorrigibles book series and went over my moms to use her scanner. Of course, being my mom, she happened to have four brand-new onesies and enough iron-on transfer paper on hand to complete the whole project that evening. We used three images from the book series and one image of Morph from Disney’s Treasure Planet and whipped up 4 sweet personalized onesies in no time:

 

Finally, I packaged everything up, painted a card with love and some warnings about maybe not letting baby lick the stuffed squirrel since it had paint. David helped me get everything packed securely and adorably.

I even happened to have some “It’s a boy!” confetti on hand to throw in on top of another layer of tissue paper. Once everything was together, David printed out a mailing label and the next day I was at the post office, wishing Nuts well on his way to Munich.  After weeks of waiting for it to get there, I got a sweet video of Jin-ju opening it all up and crying happy tears. It’s hard that I can be there to welcome the little fella in person so I’m so happy I was able to hand-make some items to show my love!