Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Second Hand Baby

Let's get something straight.  This is not a blog about babies.  Nor is it a blog about being a mother.  It's just hard not to talk about these things, given that babies and being a mother are two relatively new and rather sizeable revelations in my life, and has consumed my every waking minute, hour, day, week, and month, both in the past and yet to come.  Yet nobody likes a person that talks only about one thing (except maybe if that thing is food...?), so I will try to divert the conversation away from babies-babies-babies as much as possible.  But not until I get something off my chest first.

Why are baby clothes so nauseating?  Maybe that's an overly dramatic statement, but I'm quite certain that least 90% of the baby clothes sold in big box stores fall into this category.  Girls clothes are almost always some shade of pink or purple, and festooned with bows, flowers, ruffles, and sparkles.  Whereas boys clothes are designed with dinosaurs, cars, monsters, and dogs.  The gender stereotypes could not be more obvious, and it makes me sad that even wee babies aren't free from the social pressure to conform.

My partner and I were lucky to have received lots of lovely hand-me-down clothes from friends and family who have children just a bit older than our own.  Unfortunately this means that for the most part, our little one won't be wearing the colours and patterns that I prefer.  But hey, beggars can't be choosers, and this beggar is very thankful to know such generous people.  At the same time, a few of these second-hand clothes were really pushing my limit, so I did what any decent parent would do, and censored the bad parts.


For the rain cloud, I used two pieces of fusible interfacing to ensure that the underlying words wouldn't show through.  The interfacing was then roughly hand stitched to keep it in place and to prevent the edges from fraying.  To be perfectly honest, I used interfacing because I thought it would be easy.  In retrospect, felt would probably be easier to work with and would hold up better over time.


A raindrop shape was carved out on a small block of rubber lino, dipped in fabric paint, and stamped onto the onesie.  After heat fixing the paint, the onesie is now ready to be worn on any baby, boy or girl.

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