Mama Gone Green is a blog dedicated to raising happy children and reducing our impact on the Earth. My name is Taryn and I am the mother of 2 young kids and an environmental studies instructor at a community college in Portland, Oregon. Please join me as I journey through life as a mama, teacher, knitter, photographer, gardener, and environmentalist!

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Burp Cloth (and cloth wipes!) Tutorial

Since baby #2 is coming in approximately 6 weeks, I have been collecting hand-me-downs and pulling out Finn's baby things from the closet and garage. Luckily we have most of what we need and have been very fortunate to get some hand me downs from friends and neighbors.
What I realized that we did need were some new burp cloths. We still had several from Finn's baby days, but most of them had gotten pretty nasty, and I figured this little lady could use a few cute ones to spruce up the collection. So this weekend I managed to squeeze in a few burp cloths in between other activities. They are quick and easy and pretty cheap.... I bought some higher end flannel on sale, and so these burp cloths cost me about $2 each, however, you could find cheaper fabric for about 1/2 the price or thrifted fabric for even cheaper. But since baby #2 is not going to have anything new, I figured I could splurge for $2 burp cloths!
Here is how you make them (sorry the pictures aren't so great.... the lighting in my house is terrible):

Cut out a piece of fabric twice as large as the size of your burp cloth. I ended up buying 1/2 yard of the flannel fabrics that I liked, and then cut that in half to make 2 burp clothes. Now fold your piece of fabric in half with the patterned side folded on the inside. Sew around the edges leaving a 2-inch gap where you don't sew the fabric together.

This gap is how you will flip the fabric so that the right side is facing out. Now trim the fabric close to your seam, however, leave a little more fabric around the gap.

Now pull the fabric through the gap. I like to use a chopstick or a pencil eraser to help push the fabric through and to smooth out the edges.

Now you need to iron. I really dislike ironing, but it is pretty crucial here... if you don't, it will be hard to get the fabric to line up right. Make sure that you tuck the fabric in around the gap and iron it so that the edges match up with your sewn edges.

Once it is ironed, sew a seam about 1/4 inch in from the edge, all of the way around. When you get to the area where you left the gap, make sure the fabric is tucked under. This seam will close that gap and make your fabric lay flat.

Viola! Now you have a super cute and super easy burp cloth!

 Also, I found some scrap flannel in my fabric box and decided to make some more cloth wipes. We used cloth diapers and cloth wipes with Finn, and I figured a few extra cloth wipes would be a great idea. I followed this same pattern for the wipes, but I just made them a lot smaller. You can find my recipe for homemade wipe solution here.

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2 comments:

  1. Hi...lovely to meet you via this bloggy world...

    number 2....baby clothes...it all sounds so lovely...i guess once you have kiddos you never forget the anticipation of the arrival of one...

    how long have you got to go?

    we are here in england from oz...having set up 2 *waste-to-energy* plants here in Lancashire- amazing stuff...you may have heard of these plants?
    total reduction of landfill & using all household waste wisely...resulting in the production of energy to be used to run the plant and to be sold back to the grid or other companies who need to *offset* their usage....

    love your header photo...
    melissa .......

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  2. Beautiful flannel! I've been sewing loads of cloth wipes too. I have two friends expecting their first cloth diapered babes so both need a full stash. But I don't have many amazing prints like that. Mine are all from repurposed flannel. Not as cute, but it fits the bill. :) I'm' sure making these wipes and burp cloths helped with all the nesting feelings.

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