Toddler hooded towel

Booper recieved something like seven baby towels as gifts when he was born, each wonderful and cozy in their own ways. He has grown out of all but two, and our favorite, by far, is one by Dwell Studios. Not only is it a substantially sized towel but the hood juts off from the center of a rectangle as opposed to being in the corner of a square, which makes the wrappability of the towel great! Unfortunately, said towel costs $52.00 and I, being a true Winnipeger by now, am FAR too cheap to shell that out ;) Soooo, I decided to figure out how to make them myself. I ordered the terry cloth and sock monkey material from fabric.com (why can't we have an online fabric store like this in Canada?!?!?) and took two evenings to make 3 fabulous towels for the little monkey cousins (Owie, Ya-ya-ya, and Boopie himself). Here's how it went:

1. Cut the cloth. I got a yard of each colour of cloth and cut it at 29 inches.

 2. Cut the long, thin piece into 4 equal sections (I promise this will make sense in a minute)

3. Right sides together, pin (and then sew) 2 of each of the pieces together along one of the long sides. Iron seams flat.

4. Make a pattern piece for the hood. This is what mine looked like- I just traced the hood from his other hooded towel, or you could use a hooded jacket etc. 

4a. With right sides of the already-sewn pieces together, pin and cut out two hood piece. (Cut out two hood pieces from the terry cloth as well)

5. Pin and sew hood pieces along curved edge (with right sides together, of course).

6. Cut a piece of terry cloth the same size as your big piece of outer cloth and then pin with right sides together. Sew along 3 of the 4 sides, leaving one long side open.

7. Iron sewn hood piece, right side out. Place it, facing the right side of the terry-cloth hood piece, and pin around the outer hood (as shown). Sew together.

8. Flip hood right-side out and iron flat.

8a. Sew two layers together, as close to the edge as possible, to keep the hood's shape well.

9. Place the hood, terry-cloth towards terry cloth, and outer-fabric towards outer-fabric, inside the open side of the main part of the towel. Pin closed, leaving a foot or so on one of the sides open.

9a. Sew the side closed, leaving the gap open to turn the towel right-way out through.

10. Turn the towel right-side out and iron flat. Fold the material from the gap together and pin in place.

11. Sew all the way around the outside of the towel to help it keep its shape.

Ta, da! You're done!!!!

Geepers, I hope that made sense. It ended up being much more difficult to explain than I had anticipate :)

Booper Proof Mittens

Winter weather is arriving and Booper has a knack for removing mittens within seconds of my placing them on his cute little hands. This could be a looong winter! Anyway, I was looking on Baby Steals the other day and came across the product mimiTENS which are super cute mittens with long, sock-like sleeves so that little darlings like my own can't pull them off (as easily). Anyway, apparently many people thought they were a great product because they were all gone immediately after going up for sale on Baby Steals and sinceI just couldn't get myself to pay $31.00 for them at regular price whenI know my family's track record for lost mittens, I decided to try and make some myself. These are certainly much less stylish than the real mimiTENS but for around $9.00, Benjamin can certainly deal with wearing my functional design instead :)

I'll attempt to create a tutorial of how I made these but, please, if something is unclear, let me know as I've never done this before.

Step 1: Buy baby mittens and knee-high style kid socks. I looked for mittens that were waterproof since I'm sure Benjamin will be getting into the snow a lot this year, and I looked for ones that had a bit of a cuff that I could sew the sock onto.

Step 2: Cut the feet off of the socks (this was so oddly satisfying that I'm slightly disturbed by myself)

Step 3 (and 4): Fold and iron cut end of sock over once, and then again

Step 5: Sew the folded section down. I used a zigzag stich which worked . . . okay, but it seemed to stretch it out a bit. I'm open to suggestions for something that would work better.

Step 6: Turn mitten inside out and pin sock onto it. Notice that I had the sock pinned inside out- this is WRONG (and yes, I did it twice that way) unless you want the final product to have an inside out sock- something Booper is just going to have to deal with :)

Step 7: Sew the pinned sock-bit onto the mitten cuff. I used a straight stitch and it seemed to work pretty well.

Ta da! Finished product. They're not super fancy but, hopefully, they'll do the trick. We're supposed to get a bunch of snow tomorrow so maybe we'll be able to try them out right away.