Made with love by Mummy

I'm rapidly discovering that the problem with making things for your own baby is that you know that however it turns out you only have two options; (a) bin it/ frog it and deny all knowledge or (b) love it and live with it. Suddenly it's no longer enough to make a cute baby cardigan, it has to be the best and the most wonderful baby cardigan EVER, otherwise it clearly won't be worthy of dressing what will no doubt be (at least in the minds of its parents, grandparents and great-granny) the most wonderful baby ever to be born, and the same goes for anything else that I make.

I know it doesn't really matter how something turns out because in reality, the baby won't care as long as it is warm, dry, cuddled and well fed, H and I will be too sleep deprived to really care as long as the baby is actually dressed, and our parents will be too polite/know me too well to say anything!

However, in my ongoing search for the cutest ever baby makes, I discovered an American website called Sew Baby, who do E-patterns for bibs, booties and all sorts of little things (hurray no postage), so yesterday afternoon my desk looked like this:


Actually it still looks quite a lot like that, I'm not the tidiest of sewers!

And what was I making? Well, may I introduce:


Giraffe

Piggy, and

Gator!

All three from the one pattern, Animal Soft Blocks, by Precious Patterns

I bought needlecord for the ears or gator eyes as John Lewis in Solihull didn't have fleece in quite the right colours and I think it works pretty well. I've orientated the ears so that they stroke outward because that seemed like it might be fun for little hands.

They've actually got quite a nice variety of texture in each block; the body of the block is cotton quilting prints from the stash (I know that Gator has Amy Butler spots and a Kaffe Fassett print body, and the elephants on the giraffe came from the African Textile stand at the NEC quilt show two years ago, but beyond that I've no idea), the gator teeth and giraffe horns are silky ribbon, and the eyes and noses are DMC embroidery thread.


At the moment we have no idea what the Baby Bear thinks of them - actually I did get sick cleaning the bathroom this morning but hopefully that just means that the baby doesn't like cleaning bathrooms which is completely understandable - but H thinks they're good, and I think they're cute so they've had a bin-bag reprieve. Now all I need is a nursery to put them in!