the Hot and Sassy Housewife: Project: Burp cloths and Diaper Cake

So my friend was having a baby shower and I have given her several things, such as JR's infant car seat and stroller and his bumbo, but I wanted to do something else for her as well. She is using cloth diapers but is open to a few disposables as well and since I had some already rolled up diapers from when I was making a diaper cake a while ago I decided to make one for her. My main problem was that I only had enough diapers for two tiers so I decided to make some simple burp cloths for the top.

I have seen several variations for these diapers using different ribbons and such but I really only had time to do something simple and I am still an inexperienced sewer so I stuck to simple fabric rectangles.

Here is what you need:

1. A package of Gerber cloth diapers (they come in a 12 pack)

2. 1/4 yard of six different coordinating fabrics...

(this will provide enough to make two cloths from each fabric)

3. Thread

4. Scissors

5. Iron

Here is what the cloth diaper package looks like along with the fabrics I used...

You can pre-wash and shrink your fabric and diapers but make sure to iron them. When you get the fabric it will be in a long, skinny strip. Fold it in half and cut it at the fold. These will be your two strips that you sew onto the diaper. Take one strip and fold the shortest edge over 1/2 inch and iron it, then do this to one of the longer sides. At this point I lined my straight-edge-measurey-thingy (you know, the one that comes with your standard rotary cutter and mat in a kit?) up along the long folded edge and then flipped the fabric on the other side over the top and then slid the straight-edge-measurey-thingy out and ironed again. I could have just measured but this seemed easy and it was the perfect size.

This is what it should look like (yes, you leave the very end unfolded)...

Trim your corners...

Take a cloth diaper and center your fabric in the middle of it and pin at the corners. Be aware that the ends of the diapers are very uneven so just line it up best you can but they won't be straight. In hind sight I would have folded the long edges first and the short edges last and flipped them over the end of the cloth diaper. Oh well.

Make sure you pin your fabric RIGHT SIDE up because this isn't something you are flipping. Pin everything but that unfolded edge you left at the end. The reason you leave this edge unfolded is because the cloth diapers can vary in length. When you get to this end fold it to the correct length and pin it too. Then you are ready to sew. Just start at one corner and go around the edge or the rectangle, backing up and sewing each corner a couple of times.

They come out looking like this...

And the back looks like this...

And if you centered it well when you fold the two cloth diaper sides together on the back it should look like this...

You could fold them in a stack like this and tie a cute little ribbon on them. But of course I used them for my diaper cake.

Diaper cakes are easy.

What you need:

1. Diapers

2. Rubber bands

3. Elastic head bands

4. A couple of bottles

5. Decorations (binkey's, blocks, theme oriented items)

Step one is to take all your diapers and roll them and wrap them with a rubber band. You can use bigger diapers for the bottom tier and get smaller as you go up or use all the same size like I did.

To begin assembling set your bottle in the middle and one of your elastic headbands around it. Start putting the rolled diapers around the bottle. They may be hard to keep up at first but once you get enough in there the headband will help hold them up. I like to stuff mine as full and firm as possible. If you want your cake to be smaller, just tie the headband tighter once your circle is the right size.

Since I used smaller diapers the bottle sticks out high enough that I could start building the second tier right around it the way I did the first. If you use bigger diapers you may need to use another bottle for the second tier. Since the second tier is obviously smaller I did end up tying off the headband on this one to make it firm and tight!

I rolled my burp cloths in the same manner as the diapers and assembled them around another bottle but used a regular rubber band to hold them.

One of the fabrics I used was a remnant sold to me 50% off and I used strips of it to tie around those unsightly headbands and I tied a ribbon around the burp cloths right over the rubber band.