Pattern: Butterick 5583

New skills acquired: 

• Ribbed cuffs and collar
• Time management?

There is nothing like rushing to finish a baby gift an hour before you are supposed to give it at the baby shower.  This sleep sack marked the first baby item I ever attempted.  In the end, it came out pretty good, but I did have some difficulty.

First of all, when I borrowed this pattern I started looking at all the wonderful fleece that was available (and on sale!).  I had picked out something perfect for a baby girl when I remembered that my friend was due in April.  This was a newborn sleep sack that she would not be wearing as a newborn.  WRONG!  I immediately picked out some cute cotton knit instead.

I do not have a serger at home, so this required me taking a special trip to my parent’s house in order to sew this up.  I hadn’t bought a zipper yet, but I had most everything else so I figured I could do most of the work and install the zipper later.  WRONG!  Because I had to stitch on top of the zipper, keeping the front free, I was not able to stitch up the sides, which also delayed sleevework and making the casing.

Well at least I could make the sleeve cuffs, even if I couldn’t sew them on.  I got a bit confused on the directions here – I thought I had them correctly until I looked at the picture.  WRONG!  It was pretty clear on the picture that the ribbings were going the opposite way than I had them.  So I re-cut and sewed them the opposite way.

But I still couldn’t figure out how they were supposed to go on the sleeve, since now I had one pretty long cuff.  The directions were no help….but then…..

Ohhhhhhh!  Now they were ready to be sewn on the sleeves, whenever they were finished.

I figured I had made a pretty good dent in this project and I could just come back and spend a few hours before the shower finishing these last few steps…as long as I sewed in the zipper ahead of time…

WRONG!

Those few steps took a lot longer than I thought – I was having trouble serging around the curve of the armpit, and ended up re-serging 3 times.  I told my mom I was going to serge the cuff onto the sleeve and she looked at me like I was nuts.  Since I had to stretch the cuff to fit around the sleeve, I decided to stitch it on first, then serge around it to finish the edge.  RIGHT!  This was actually coming along….I thought I would actually beat my deadline and even have some extra time to cut out some fabric for another project…WRONG!

I also had to learn how to use my new snap fastener thingy that I had just bought online (twice, because one was lost in the snowstorm).  No issues here, but it took a minute to figure out how to put the snap pieces in the plastic and hammer them into place.  And I checked and double checked to make sure I was hammering the backing into the correct side.  I didn’t want to make that mistake.

I’m not sure why, but when I finally finished up the casing on the bottom for the drawstring and packed up my stuff, it was a lot later than I thought.  Well that was okay, since it should just take a little over a half hour to get to the shower.  I’ll just plug it into my GPS and WRONG!  One hour and 15 minutes!

So I was a little late…but I did make it, gifts in hand.  All’s well that ends well, just maybe I shouldn’t cut it that close when making a gift.  It’s hard to predict when things are going to go…..