Baby Project 2

These past few months I have been busy with my sewing machine! Needless to say, I have broken 3 sewing needles, I have been working so heavily with my machine, haha!

I know I mentioned in a previous post about making bibs and some burp cloths for a friend's baby shower. 

Scalloped crochet edging.

I chained 5-6 and slip stitched in every third sc

I made one more thing for my friend. It's called a car seat blanket. It looks something like this (minus the hood): http://www.imperfecthomemaking.com/2012/01/tutorial-hooded-car-seat-blankies.html, and I crocheted around the edges.

I was working on it for two days and I was literally crocheting the day of the baby shower! I wasn't able to take a picture of it, but I used the same fabric as the bibs and burp cloths, but instead of the yellow thread for the edging, I used a fluffy peach color.

When my eldest was born, the first friends that we ever made in a new state, had made one as a gift.

The concept of the blanket is during the winter months, you typically have your baby bundled up and swaddled, but in order to put your baby in the car seat, you have to take the swaddling off, strap your baby in, then try to swaddle them back up. With the car seat blanket, you feed the straps through the holes on the blanket, strap your baby in, then bundle them up! It stays in the car seat so every time you leave your house, you just strap and wrap your baby. It a genius concept and I praise the person who came up with the pattern first! 

The link is a very good tutorial of how to make one. The one I have has a few changes (picture of the one we have is below).

1) I made mine with just flannel instead of fleece and batting. Although I am sure you could use fleece without the batting.

2) I crocheted my edges. I used a hemstitch, or winged, needle to make the holes to crochet in. You could also hand sew using the buttonhole stitch, then crochet on that. (I used this method for the burp cloths. I didn't have the hemstitch needle when I made them.)

3) Probably the most different part, Instead of two long vertical lines for the straps, I have 4 holes that you feed the straps in.

This is the one we got from a friend.

Close up of the holes.

What it looks like in the seat.

What it looks like with baby in it before wrapping baby up.

How it looks with baby wrapped up.

How I wrap the baby is I tuck in one "petal," then tuck in the other "petal," and finally tuck in the bottom "petal." You could fold down the top "petal" to cover their head/face from the wind if you don't have one of those car seat canopy/tent, or make a hood out of the top one like the blanket in the link provided above.