Since my layoff in October, I’ve been working on Christmas gifts for my daughter and her cousins. This post is a roundup of what I made for La La.
Since turning two this year, I’ve noticed, and her teachers at day care have also observed that she’s been enjoying being a little mommy to her baby dolls. Her teacher has sent photos of her giving her baby a bath with the other kids and here she is way back in March helping her baby to go to sleep.
At home too, I’ve observed her putting her babies in my shoes like little cradles, putting her babies to sleep on pillows and patting them to sleep, and leaving the room with the white noise machine on and some music so they will fall asleep easily. (This is her routine, white noise and nature sounds, although recently she switched to music instead).
She then tells daddy and me to be quiet so her babies can sleep. Yia Yia gave her a bottle for the baby she gave her last Christmas, and she plays with that a lot too.
Since she has been such the little mommy, I thought I’d give her some tools to help in her play.
I found this great tutorial for making all kinds of pretend-play toys and this set was perfect: a diaper bag, wipes, and diapers, sized for the baby doll she got for Christmas last year from Yia Yia. I actually didn’t make the diapers exactly the same, but used her pattern as a guide for cutting the fabric. I also didn’t make her doll bassinet and changing pad, because I already had a bassinet of my own in the works and I also made a quilt for the doll, and I didn’t want to go crazy with all the other stuff I was making.
So, here’s the diaper bag.
And the wipes. So clever, you can fold them so they pop up! I used blue felt because all of our wipes come from Costco and come in blue packages, so it’s more realistic.
Here’s the quilt. It looks like I pieced the whole thing, but it was actually a cheater with space between the 2.5" squares. I had bought the fabric thinking it would be perfect for 1" hexagons, but I used a little bit for this quilt. I used the method described here, but of course without the interfacing.
Here’s the bassinet. I started this back in July. It’s all hand stitched and hand quilted. I had to figure out how to make it curve at the ends, which I did by using hexagons, pentagons and diamonds. It’s lined with white cotton over a piece of batting I got in a sampler at the quilt festival over the summer.
I really learned a lot while doing the hand quilting – though mainly I learned that it’s a slow process and you really can make better progress when you have the right tools. I broke one embroidery hoop before I ended up buying a quilting hoop, and tried several different needles before settling on the smallest ones I could find, size 12.
In addition to that stuff, the mom of one of her cousins asked for new clothes for the dolls I made them last Christmas because they really enjoy playing with the dolls. So I made clothes for all the dolls, including La La’s.
I made this top and skirt with fabric that has all these "T" words, describing two year olds. I only have a year to use the fabric, so now’s the time.
I also used that fabric to bind her quilt, since it matched the purple nicely.
I made this t-shirt, and a jumper out of corduroy. I haven’t really sewn with knits before, and discovered that the right tools make all the difference again – mainly the right needle for knits really helped.
Next up is a pair of pajamas made of flannel, with coordinating cuffs.
Also, I forgot to photograph them, but I made her baby some new shoes out of vinyl, so they look like brown leather shoes.
Over all, I think La La really liked everything, but the things I see her playing with most are the wipes and the bassinet, which she seems to think is a changing pad. That’s ok, as long as she has fun playing with it, that’s all that matters to me.
She got the same baby this year from her Grammy, and was very excited to have two of the same baby – "Sisters!" she said. So now she has two diapers to change whenever one of them ‘poops’ as she likes to tell me. 🙂
