Ella Kaelin

I'm an aunt again.

My fifth niece was born on May 18th waaaaaaaay out in Pittsburgh, PA, so I haven't seen her yet.

I haven't even seen any pictures of her yet. But I hear she is a real cutie, so I'll just have to take her parents' word for it.

Of course I had to make her something cute to welcome her to our family. I found some super cute flannels at the Memorial Day fabric sale at Jackman's and decided to make her a set of the two sided flannel burp cloths I've shown you before here. But this time I left off the flower, which I've found doesn't stand up in the wash very well.

Over at homemade by jill I saw similar burp cloths with a rag edge. I decided to make two plain and two rag edged.

I mixed and matched the patterns so they are all cute on either side.

Also at homemade by jill I saw a cute little vinyl bib pattern and got inspired to make little Ella a bib as well. (Sorry, forgot to rotate the pics.)

This didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but it's still cute. It was supposed to have purple piping around all of the edges....and I made one like that. It was much cuter than this version except for the neck hole. The turn was just so tight that it was a mess trying to get the terry cloth backing, vinyl covered fabric front and piping to lay flat. I would have had to *gasp* hand sew it. I DON'T HAND SEW. So I just made another version without the piping.

I made all of these goodies (and the aforementioned bib failure) one morning and got them in the mail to Pitt that afternoon. These are such simple, cute and easy baby gifts (especially for babies like Ella that really don't need anything because they have big sisters that have handed down all of their clothes, toys, accesories, etc.) that I make them frequently and give them away. You can't go wrong with burp rags and bibs.

Although, I have heard tales of babies that don't spit up much. I've even witnessed parents walking around carrying their babies without so much as a tissue between themselves and the little tyke. I've never personally experienced anything like that. I carried as many burp rags as I could fit in a jumbo diaper bag plus several changes of clothing for the baby and one change of clothes for me.

Yeah. It was that bad. All three times.

Nursery workers at church actually called my son, "the spitter" and wore special (aka old) clothes when they had to work in his room. Brian never touched one of our kids in the morning before school or church. He just couldn't take the time to change clothes before heading out the door. You should see the way he still cringes everytime someone hands him a baby. Old habits die hard.

Boy, I don't miss those days. I can still smell it. Ugh!