The Humble Homemaker: The (Super) Easy Baby Doll Sling and Scrappy Flowers!

We have a pretty large family that is growing, and growing, and growing. Not only our little unit here, but my husband's side of the family as well. I love, love, love being a part of a large family. It's new to me. I grew up in a pretty small family (just myself and 1 younger sister) and most of my relatives are spread out over the country. One of the things that has taken some getting used to is having a birthday/christening/something party to attend at least once a month, sometimes more! It's great, don't get me wrong. But geez...it can get expensive if you don't plan ahead and be resourceful. With this in mind, I have a niece and nephew with birthdays coming up (January 29th and February 14th, respectively. There's also another little guy turning 1 on February 1st, but that's a different post!). I was trying to come up with ideas for birthday gifts that they would actually use and enjoy, but wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

I started thinking of how much I love baby slings/wraps/carriers and decided to make one for my niece. I had some fabric left over from a quilt that I had made for Margaux while I was still pregnant that would be perfect (and free!). I also wanted a really simple pattern...because I'm not so great with following directions and I'm still pretty new to sewing things.

I found this pattern over at Domestic Dork that was seriously easy and simple. I won't bore you with pictures of the sling making process because it's very well laid out of at Domestic Dork, but here's the finished product. Poor, poor Christopher had to model it for me. Zac told me I was being abusive :( I just needed to make sure the size was okay and he's the same age as my niece.

As you can see, he's not so thrilled. At least I put elmo in it and not a baby doll....right?

So, I also wanted to decorate it with some "Scrappy Flowers" because the sling material is white and kind of plain. I had strips of fabric left over from the jelly roll that I used to make Margaux's Quilt so I sewed them together like this:

As you can see, I didn't pay much attention to making sure the strips of fabric were all the same width. I wanted this to look "unpolished" and imperfect. I just tried to make the colors contrast a bit. Then I ironed it out to make it easier to work with.

The next step was to draw some flowers on some freezer paper and pin them to the fabric:

Again, the flowers are far from perfect...that's okay! I pinned them on with the shiny side of the freezer paper on and then ironed them on. The shiny stuff adheres to the fabric with the use of the hot iron. Then I cut the flowers out leaving about a 1/4 around the outside of the cut out flower:

Then sew them on!:

The wax paper will pull right off around the stitches. Once you wash it, the outsides of the flowers will fray a little bit to give it a more rustic look, or you can tuck them in as you sew for a less rustic look.