Car seat cover

I finally started to get ready for Baby Boy. My first project was turning Koala's car seat into a boy friendly car seat.

Initially, I looked up car seat covers to buy because I'm lazy and would rather just buy one. But they weren't that nice looking and were so expensive! I might as well buy a new car seat! And when I looked at them, I thought that I could definitely do a better job. 

I'm always a bit nervous to start new projects because I always think that it won't turn out. Secretly, I was hoping someone would offer to make it for me lol! But I finally decided to make it and went out this weekend and picked up some material. (I figured this would give me something to blog about lol!) 

I wasn't quite sure what kind of material to buy. I wanted something that was soft  but wouldn't get dirty too easily. I ended up finding this really soft velour type material that's used for baby blankets in the fleece/flannel aisle. I liked the color and it was polka dot (all the other materials were ugly colors or prints or floral). I was debating between that and PUL material (typically used for cloth diaper covers so waterproof and easy to wipe) but I didn't like the prints they had in PUL. 

For those who are wondering how much material is needed, I bought a yard just to be safe and ended up using a little over half. I guess if I was smart, I could've measure the pink part of the cover and figured out exactly how much I needed but I didn't. I would say that if you're going to make a cover and don't want to measure beforehand, 1 yard is plenty. (Then again it depends on how much you have to cover- I obviously was able to keep the grey parts as is.)

I briefly looked at this blog which detailed how the author took apart her car seat cover and made a new one. I thought that it was too complicated and there had to be an easier way. 

As I've said in my other blog posts, I'm not the best sewer and I'm not that crafty so I try to find the easiest way to do things. I ended up deciding that I just needed to cut out pieces big enough to cover the pink parts and sew them on. 

I took the cover off of the car seat and took pics of how to put all the buckles etc back in place correctly (my friend suggested it and I'm glad she did! I know it seems like it's easy to remember how to put the buckles back but I wanted to make sure it was correct and when I finished I did consult the pics to see if the buckles went in then out or out then in. I blame pregnancy brain for not remembering lol).

Initially when I looked at the car seat, it looked like I had to cut 6 pieces- two for the middle and 4 sides (top and bottom) and then I would have to sew those pieces all together. 

But since I like short cuts, I decided to just cut two pieces and pleat the seam in the side if I needed to. (I didn't end up needing to pleat it at all. I just tucked it in to make the creases on the sides)

Like most of my patterns for my other projects, I winged it and made my own. I used the existing cover to trace onto the fabric I had. (The picture below shows the cover on the front on the fabric, but I actually turned it over and drew the pattern on the fabric on the back. I made sure to leave about an inch around the actual cover so that I would have fabric to work with. 

Note: I did not take apart the original cover like the blog example. I just folded it in half so that I had the shape of what I was tracing. 

The smaller 2nd piece above I just marked where the grey part started and then just cut straight across (where the arrow is pointing).

I then took the two pieces and  I matched up the two rounded sides and sewed them together. I didn't mark exactly where I needed to sew- I eyeballed it approximately an inch from the edge. It ended up working out. 

Then when I had the two pieces sewn together, I started sewing it to the original cover. I lined up the seam from the two pieces I had just sewn to the seam in the middle of the two pieces of the original cover. Then I started to hand stitch them together (yup, that's right. I hand stitched the cover on. It took a bit longer than a machine would but as I've said in other blogs, I'm not good with the sewing machine so hand sewing is actually less frustrating. And also, the cover was too thick to fit under the foot of my sewing machine and I didn't want to go through the hassle of trying to find a foot and changing it etc.) When I was sewing, I made sure the needle went in where the existing seams were and that it came out on the other side where the existing seam was so that they ended up lining up perfectly. 

Once the middle seams were sewn together, I started sewing the sides together.

I used a stitch that I use when hand sewing the quiet book. In case anyone's interested in that stitching (otherwise skip to the next paragraph lol), 1) I start off in the back and poke the needle through. 2) Then I poke the needle through from front to back but rather than go straight back, I make it go to the side and poke it back out about the length of a stitch. 3) I then double back and poke it back through the previous hole (the end of the 1st stitch) and 4) then from the back side, j poke the needle back through the hole I just made (the end of the 2nd stitch). Then I repeat to make more stitches. Since that description is very confusing, I included pictures. They're not pictures from the car seat because it's really hard to see the thread. 

It's a bit tedious but I feel like it gives it a cleaner look. 

Once I sewed around the sides, I had to add the holes where the straps go through. Technically I think you could use the sewing machine and use the button hole technique to make the holes before sewing it to the original cover. But since I only know how to sew straight lines on the sewing machine, I had to hand stitch that too.

I started off by cutting a slit where the hole was (top right pic)  I didn't make the slit as big as the hole. Then I used a blanket stitch around the hole (once again, another thing I learned while making the quiet book. This was the blog I learned it from.)

Once I did all the holes (5), I added a strip of fabric (no pattern, just took a strip of fabric that was big enough and sewed it on) to the underside that wraps around the top of the car seat just for completeness.

Then I was done with the main cover! It took me all evening which is a lot of time but I thought it would take me days so I was happy! 

The next piece was the headrest and canopy. 

It was too hard to try to trace and cut material so I ended up pinning the fabric to the headrest and then cutting it big enough to cover the area. Then I sewed it on.

The finished headrest

The headrest had two snaps that were used to snap onto the bottom grey part so what I ended up doing was covering the snap entirely with fabric. Once the headrest was sewn on, I cut a circle where the snap was and tucked the material into the edges of the snap. Then I sewed the material around the snap so that the fabric was secure. 

For the canopy, I took material and pinned it to the pink parts just like I did for the headrest. There were two sections for the canopy- the middle section and then the small trim in the front. 

After I finished that I thought I was done until I realize that the inside of the canopy was pink! So I had to decide whether to leave it pink or cover it. In the end, I decided I had come this far, I might as well finish it. I didn't want to use the nice velour material since it was expensive so I took some white material that I had and used that. The white material was thin cotton material so I had to actually use two layers. The first panel I did was the middle and I didn't measure the material correctly so part of the panel only has one layer so you can see the pink if you look closely. 

The last panel I did (closest to the front) I had to use different material because I didn't have enough of the original white material. I also accidentally cut a hole in the material when I was trying to trim the extra material. (As you can tell, I was kind of rushing to get things done and got sloppy.) So I added two small blue hearts - one to cover the mistake that I cut and one to cover ugly sewing where I couldn't get the edge of the white material to fold and look nice. 

The finished inside of the canopy.
Like I said, you can still see the pink in the middle layer but since it's the inside of the canopy, I don't think it matters that much.

This is the finished car seat. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. It was a lot cheaper than buying a new car seat or even a new cover and it feels good to make something for the baby! I can't wait to use it!

Quiet book: Duckling gets a Cookie

Koala loves reading books and one of her favorite series is the Pigeon books by Mo Willems. She got this set as a birthday gift and we read them soooooo many times that we borrowed the rest of the Pigeon books (that we could find) from the library.

When I was thinking of what quiet book pages to make, I wanted to incorporate things that Koala would be familiar with. One of the first pages I worked on was a cookie jar. On Pinterest,  I saw a couple different pages with the cookie jar concept where the cookie jar opens up for the child to put a cookie in. 

Of all the different cookie jar pages, I liked this one the best: cookie jar

I traced this cookie jar and the letters (using my highlighter & computer screen) and cut out the felt pieces. I reinforced the opening of the cookie jar with Pellon to make it more durable and used my sewing machine to sew the jar on the page. 

But I decided to tweak the page to make it more interesting for Koala. One of the pigeon books is The Duckling gets a Cookie.

So I decided to add Duckling to the page just as an accent. 

Since the book was about the right size, I made the template for the Duckling by tracing the Duckling on the front cover. Then I glued the Duckling and the letters to the page. I also made a felt cookie. 

The cookie goes in Duckling's hand and in the jar. 

I added a snap to the back of the cookie and to the page so that the cookie snaps in place so that Duckling is holding it. 

Since this was one of the first pages that I completed, it was a learning experience.  When I was all done, I let Koala play with it and I learned 2 things. 

1) Loose pieces need to be attached with ribbon

Koala seemed to like the page right away and immediately knew to put the cookie in the cookie jar. As much as she liked the page, she really LOVED the cookie! She kept it with her and carried it around with her which is how the first cookie got lost. I made a new cookie and attached it with ribbon to the page. Koala was furious at first that the cookie was stuck to the page because she couldn't carry it around but she eventually got over it.

2) Glue isn't strong enough 

When researching how people put together the pages, it was hard to find details on exactly what materials people used. So I searched Pinterest for the best glue for felt and came across a pin that said Felt Glue was the best and 'bonds felt permanently'. Duh- seems logical that the best glue for felt is called Felt glue.

So I glued everything down from the cookie jar itself to the letters and Duckling-  feeling confident that the pieces would be 'bonded permanently.' But when I came home from work the first day that I let Koala play with it, I discovered that 1) the cookie was missing and 2) the cookie jar now read "co ki". Hubby told me that he found Koala picking off the letters. I glued them back on and gave the page back to her only to find that she was really interested in picking off the pieces and I realized that I would have to sew each piece down to the page so that she couldn't pick them off. It was a bit tedious because I ended up hand stitching everything on (except the cookie jar) because it's less frustrating to hand sew and requires less concentration since I'm not very good with the sewing machine. The drawbacks are that it's time consuming and my stitching is uneven. But it keeps everything in place and prevents Koala from peeling off the pieces. She's stopped attempting to pick pieces off since she knows they're stuck on. I no longer use the felt glue because I find that once the glue dries, it makes it really difficult to get the needle through the felt. It's one less step to skip the glue.

When I added a page to the other side of the Pellon, I messed up the stitching in the top right corner so I added Pigeon to the page to cover up my mistake. It worked out nicely. 

Here's the final product: