Car Seat Canopy

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I’ve been busy….getting big.  Lol.  My pregnancy has been progressing and I’m starting to slow down, huff and puff with every step I take, and eat like I have a bottomless pit. Yay…so fun!

Well, one of my projects that I put on the back burner, but wanted to make before Baby #2 gets here is a Car Seat Canopy since she’ll be born in the WI winter.  I remember with Lydia, we had to drop her off every cold morning and pick her up every cold evening so we just threw a thick baby blanket over the car seat to help keep her warm.  It worked for its purpose, but why not make a cozy canopy this time since I have the sewing itch? 

Last Fall, I had made my niece a canopy with a cotton outer and a minky inner piece that just drapped over the car seat and my cousin used it until it was warm enough not to use anymore (I love to see when my gifts are constantly used!)  She said that it helped keep it dark for when Baby Leila was still snoozing in the car seat and it did help with the warmth, but one flaw I did notice was that when it was windy, it kept flying around!  Who wants to deal with that right? 

So this time around for Baby, I added elastic all around to make it stay snug to the car seat.  No more flying!  I also used a cotton outer piece, but instead of minky for the inner, I used fleece fabric just for added thickness and warmth.  I hope she loves it!  I was going to add a peekaboo window, but now looking at it, I like the way it is now and the canopy is fairly easy to lift up and sneak a peek at baby or pull up and around without disturbing her. It didn’t take me as long as I thought it would to make it either (especially because it was a prototype kind of sewing with the elastic).  Num Num!

Fleece Winter Hat

Though I don't love WI winters...it's been on my mind and Fall is just about here so it won't be too long! Winter this year means Baby #2 will be here. Maybe that's why I'm such in a hurry to get to snowfall!

I was itching for something to sew and fleece is always easy and fun so a fleece winter hat for Lydia it is! I actually made it a size up so it's a bit big for her, but oh well. Not like I can't make more or she won't grow into it!

She wanted me to post this picture because of her cool facial expression. Cheese!! Love her!

My DIY drawer bins!

Now that Lydia is older and her wardrobe is slowly growing, I wanted to get her and her sister some dresser drawers.  Lydia’s great at pulling her clothes out and changing herself, but I was currently using plastic drawer bins for her clothes (because when we had her we were still living the cramped apartment life) and her socks and such were stored in a bin in her armoire that she couldn’t reach.  I thought it was time to upgrade her and now that she’s such a big girl, getting a dresser for her baby sister would be good too because then she could help grab stuff for the baby if needed as well.   Plus side for me is that now I get to use the armoire for some of my sewing storage!  We ended up getting two white Ikea dressers and thanks to my SIL and her fast hands, she and my pregnant self were able to put Lydia's dresser together fairly fast. 

Because Lydia’s things are still so small, I could pretty much fit 2-3 different things in one drawer.  I wanted it to be somewhat organized and simple for Lydia to put things away and to get things so I thought it would be nice to get bins or some kind of divider/separator to put in the drawers.  Issue #1, bins are expensive! Issue #2, I couldn’t find anything to fit decently into the drawers without wasting space or to even fit period.  I searched the web for ideas on dividers for drawers and found some nice ideas.  Some people actually built dividers – which though was nice, I didn’t want to spend more money on wood and my knowledge and tools on wood working is very, very limited.  Some creative and or frugal people used cereal boxes or cardboard and some went farther and covered the dividers with wrapping paper to make it pretty.  This was a good idea and I liked the wrapping paper part to make it pretty, but I wanted it for clothes and I wasn’t sure how well wrapping paper was going to hold up to 3 year old hands.  It also looked like these cute, wrapping paper covered box/bins were used for small desk or craft drawers and were on the small side.  I needed something taller to clearly define the separation of things.  I contemplated a few nights and then a light bulb went on….why don’t I just sew something?  Duh! Fabric is a lot more sturdy than paper, but my other issue was how was I going to make the fabric stiff enough to stay up?  Again, I didn’t want to use any money so after running ideas back and forth in my head, I came up with this idea. 

I was going to use thick, sturdy cardboard to make a perimeter like box.  And I only needed to make the sides and duct tape it well so that it would stand on its own.  Then I was going to sew almost like a lining to go over the box perimeter so that it would look pretty instead of just having duct taped cardboard showing.  It’s quite simple actually.  I don’t know why it took me a few days to come up with the idea.  Haha.   

I still had the thick cardboard box from the dresser and my cousin had just moved to her new house so she had plenty of clean, thick boxes for me to use if I needed more. 

Then I remembered a while ago I purchased a couple yards of this fabric because it was super cheap and I was planning on making something with it.  I had started the project and then it came to a halt because I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had already cut up the fabric.  I hate it when that happens because I couldn’t find any other project to use the already cut up fabric for…until now. Yay!  By having to make lining for the smaller divided sections, I was able to use these randomly cut pieces of fabric instead of needing large yards of a piece of fabric.

 I’ve never sewn a bin or basket lining before, but I figured it shouldn’t be too hard because I was just sewing straight lines basically and I could use my new serger…bonus!  I measured the inside of my drawers and figured out my dimensions.  For Lydia’s dresser, I decided I only wanted to make bins for two drawers; one drawer would have three sections/bins (undies/undershirts/socks) and the second drawer would have two sections/bins (pants/shorts and skirts). 

I drafted up the dimensions of each section, added seam allowances, cut my pieces, sew/serged the pieces together, cut my cardboard pieces, taped them together, placed them in the drawer to make sure they fit well, put the lining on the box perimeter, and there you go!

My finished DIY drawer bins! 

Nice right? Now onto Baby’s bins!  She’s going to be a little more cutting, sewing, and duct taping because she’ll have all her little things I need to separate out!