Sewing A Baby Lovey

I’m so happy… there’s a new baby in the family! Not mine or I wouldn’t be sewing so much. No, my adorable sister in law recently gave birth to a healthy, beautiful little girl. And she doesn’t sew. Not even a little. So I had to make my new little niece something extra special.

I used a free tutorial from the blog  2 Little Hooligans. It is very well written and easy to understand.

 

I used this custom bundle I got at a quilt shop that is no longer in business.

Tip: Support small quilt shops!

Because it was a small quilt shop, the fabric was cut so straight that no trimming was needed, I could start cutting the strips for this fabric right away. .

Shannon’s tutorial is pretty straight forward. First, cut lots of strips and gather them.

I had not used the gathering foot on this machine yet, so I decided to experiment. I turned the stitch length up to the max, tightened up the tension by two, and gave it a go. Perfect! Quilting cotton fabric is pretty lightweight and that helped. I made eight ruffle strips in about 5 minutes.

Sewing the ruffle strips together seemed a bit trickier because it is not natural to push double layers of bunched fabric under your presser foot. But it worked.

Following the rest of the tutorial was pretty straightforward. I basted my ruffle on instead of using lots of pins the way she does. It takes longer, maybe, but I don’t like sewing over pins. Also, I don’t want to talk about the ultra cuddle fleece on the back.

Tip: Use minky like she does. I’m sure it’s way easier!