Burp Cloths

I went to a diaper shower on Sunday for my friend Nujoud. She is due with her second kiddo — gender TBD! — next month. She already has most of the big baby stuff she needs from the first time around, so the organizers decided on a diaper shower instead! We all had lunch at Cafe Adobe, and everyone brought diapers. I wanted to add a little something extra because these days, baby showers are a good excuse for me to try a new project. I didn’t have much time, so I settled on making some burp cloths!

“Making” is really the wrong word to describe it, since it’s really just a cloth diaper with a strip of cute fabric sewn on. I really should say I “embellished” some already functional burp cloths, but that’s less exciting. Anyway, this was a really easy project. There are several tutorials out there that are all variations on the same theme, so I just made it up as I went along.

I had intel that the nursery features monkeys, so I picked a cute monkey-print flannel and an animal-print cotton. I’m really not sure what type of fabric is ideal for burp cloths, and maybe flannel is too soft and fuzzy to use to wipe up puke, but it was too cute to pass up.

The only real issue I had was that I measured one diaper and cut all the pieces of fabric based on those measurements. It turns out that each of the diapers was a slightly different size after shrinking in the dryer, so the fabric strip was a little short on some of them. Oh well. If you inspected each cloth closely, you’d also notice that I used 3 different zig zag stitch length/width selections and I tried to hone in on what looked best. That difference is minor though.

On the back, of course, you can only see the stitching. But it’s a pretty zig zag so it looks nice. From start to finish it took about 3 hours to make 5 cloths — and that includes at least 1.5 hours to prewash and dry the diapers and fabric (which is essential since the cloth diapers shrink). So really we’re talking about a project that can be done in under 2 hours, maybe even under an hour if you’re fast.