Easy sew burp cloths

My lovely cousin Dawn just had her first baby so I thought I'd send a hand made baby gift to her in California.  I already had some fabric on hand from my first son, so I thought I'd reuse some of it and purchase some new fabric in shades of green to complement her nursery.   I made her six burp cloths using new white cloth diapers and rectangular pieces of fabric.  The fabric is from Joann's and the cloth diapers were from Baby's R' Us.  Aren't they so cute??

Here was my initial stack of fabrics. You can see that I decided against the bottom fabric and the blue polka dot fabric.  I pre-treated all of my fabric by washing them in cold water with salt. After drying them I ironed all of them.  The next thing I did was measure the inner portion of the cloth diapers to see what size rectangular shape I needed for my fabric, plus a seam allowance.  I used white thread for all of them so that the thread didn't show up on the back of the diaper.

Next I cut a piece of cardboard the exact size as the part of the diaper cover I wanted to cover. This was my "pattern" so to speak that I used for all the fabric. I simply folded the fabric over the cardboard to use as my guide. A cereal box would also be a good choice for a pattern, but my fabric ended up being too long.

Once I folded the fabric over the cardboard I ironed, folded and pinned it.  Then I laid the rectangular pieces directly over the diaper cover and centered it. I top stitched it around all four sides, not lifting my needle as I went.

So simple right?  I stacked them up nicely and tied a big green ribbon on top.

I hope she enjoys these and they should stand the test of time.

Happy sewing!
xo
Cathleen

p.s. things are coming along on our kitchen floor renovation. A plumber came out and said "yep, the dishwasher is broken." Duh.  So now we have a dishwasher repair person coming out to fix it.  The water evaporation machines are still in the kitchen airing it out and on Monday the floor will continue to be ripped up.