Fleece Baby Bunting

Hi there. Well, today I have another sewing project. I did not realize how much sewing I’ve done.

This bunting is made from pattern Kwik Sew 3733 and the mittens are from Burda 9477. I’m not sure if they’re still available. Sometimes older patterns will be available on SewingPatterns.com for download.

Ok, let’s dive in. I’ve made three of these buntings and they are NOT Kwik to Sew. The one above was for my niece and it was kinda the worst one I made. Maybe the first was the worst though because I threw it out. This one has some major issues that you might be able to see.

Firstly, a curved zipper. It has a flap on the inside to protect the baby from the zipper. It is curved because it needed to zip all the way to the bottom. I remember redoing this part several times. Stuff just didn’t line up right.

The hood and collar. I just have so, so much trouble with collars because there are always 10 layers of fabric that need to match up perfectly and not have any mess-ups on seam allowance. If you’ve read other posts by me, you might know I’m terrible at keeping seam allowances even. With this collar I think there was a part on the inner hood that was a bit short, so I ironed on a piece of fabric to cover it with some hem tape but the hem tape was BLACK. What??? It showed through and then instead of continuing with that, I removed the hem tape halfway through so it was like half black showing through and half normal. I am so dumb. Then, for some reason I topstitched the collar on the outside by hand. It looks terrible!

I got a sew-on snap for the top to secure it, but I don’t know how to hide the stitches on the outside so it was kind of visible. That’s why I put a button there.

On the bottom there are snaps set in a way that you can have 2 legs or one big bag-like area. I had to use pronged snaps, which are the most vile, monstrous inventions designed by man. Use KAM snaps if you do a project like this. That is a huge tip that I am giving. Don’t get pronged snaps. I must have tried 10 times for each snap. The problem is in the way you have to set them. Here’s an illustration.

I still say stick to KAM snaps instead of post snaps for kid stuff because metal post stamps are kind of too much for a light kid garment. And KAM has many colors. Anyway, as you can see by the illustration, you have to align the prongs under the fabric with the other part on top. It’s impossible. Then you hit it with a hammer and the prongs are supposed to go into the grooves on the top part and bend outward. This is what happens:

Some prongs don’t go into the grooves, and poke out dangerously (this is the most common result)
All the prongs don’t go into the grooves, and it just doesn’t attach at all (second most common)
If you’re using pearl snaps, the pearl breaks.
Nothing happens
Other
These are things that don’t happen:

The snap gets set perfectly.
I’ve vowed never to use them again. I seriously just remember having snap parts strewn about the carpet as I toiled fruitlessly.

Recently I was looking for colored post snaps for a faux leather project and there are none. I decided to paint them with ceramic paint.

Anyway, that’s the story for that.

The mittens are interesting. I think it’s best to use 2 layers of flannel and not to use fleece because it’s too thick. Even just one fleece layer is too thick. Otherwise it’s not too bad of a pattern.

Later!