Diaper cakes, custom shirts and tutus galore!

I’ve decided to put my newly found interest in sewing and crafts into a little side-business.

Thanks to my mom, I now have an old but sturdy and reliable Singer sewing machine. I decided I would try to make a first birthday shirt for John since I didn’t want to go with the generic Babies-R-Us shirt. It took lots of research for this left-brainer but I finally figured out how to do it. It took me a long time but the shirt turned out well. Now I’m homing in my skills and working on little details. Behold, my second shirt and a matching tutu:

I made this for one of Ryan’s coworkers. She chose the phrase and the colors and voila! In the future, I would like to use higher-quality shirts (nothing against Gerber!) in various colors (I think pink would have been nice here). It was tedious working with such a teeny tiny shirt (0-3 months) but good for the experience.

Onto the tutu. I like the look of the waisband here but I’m going to start experimenting with elastic waistbands instead of ribbon tied in the back. I like the look of the ribbon and will figure out a way to incorporate it into the tutu somehow along with some other embellishments. We’ll just say that Emma, and possibly John, will have lots of tutus when all is said and done.

Lastly, the diaper cakes. I made one for Monica and Quentin‘s baby shower back in May. Their nursery theme is “Snug as a Bug” so I went with insects for the diaper cake. It was a three tier cake made of size 1, 2 and NB diapers (each tier was a different size). The layers were then wrapped in a receiving blanket (off their registry) and secured with layered ribbon. Paper “grass” separated the layers and had brushes and combs in the shapes of insects “crawling” on them. It was all topped off with a bunch of roses made from socks and a bumble bee nail clipper. Again, behold:

So, please spread the word. If you know of someone who is having a baby soon or are looking for a baby gift, let them know about me! I promise that my prices will be reasonable once I come up with them and I’m pretty much a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff. I can also simply do the tutus or shirts individually.

Thank you! 🙂