An 11-month-old bustling baby girl

April 6, 2010 at 3:17 pm | Posted in Sewing/Crafts | 1 Comment

Only one more month until Baby Alice turns one! She’s an expert crawler now, and stands momentarily. However, she’s still not walking yet.

She has quite a few dresses and longer tunics that interfere with her getting around. They frustrate her, if not to tears, then at least to loud protests. She grows so quickly that if I put them away until she began to walk, they’d be too small. Rather than putting the dresses directly into the hand-me-down pile without her ever wearing them, I thought about how to keep the fabric from getting under those busy knees.

I thought about maybe sewing buttons on the outside and loops inside to gather the material, but that seemed too much trouble. Sewing ribbons inside and out to tie the skirt up was a little less work, but my lazybones tendencies run deep. I finally remembered some mitten clips I had, and those do the job simply and effectively. (For my friends from warmer climes who aren’t familiar with them, they’re simple short elastic bands with little jaw clips on either end, used to keep kiddoes from losing their mitts. Allegedly.)

To make a baby bustle: attach the clips on the outside, gather the excess fabric up, then clip to the inside of the garment. And she’s off!