Burp Cloth

With more time on my hands I have been yearning to craft. Whether it be coloring, sewing or trying my hand with upholstery. Recently two of my friends were having baby showers close together and I wanted to do something special. I scoured Pinterest for homemade baby things and found a few ideas I liked. Since the babies to come were going to be a girl and a boy I decided on making burp cloths.

There were several ways offered to make the cloths, but I decided to go with simple and adorable.

Here are the materials I used.

• 1/3 yard of terry cloth
• 1/3 yard of patterned fabric
• Thread
• Scissors
• Pins
• Marking pen or chalk
• Measuring tape
• Iron
• Lint roller

(I double the yardage as I wanted to make more than two burp cloths.)

When I first started sewing a friend of mine gave some solid advice. If the fabric you are using is 100% cotton, always wash it at warm temperature and dry it at the highest setting. You want the fabric to shrink now so it will not shrink after your project is sewn. If you wait to wash your project after it is sewn, you run the risk of warping your fabric, especially if you are using two different fabrics together like cotton and polyester. Cotton will shrink and polyester will not. One side of the burp cloth will have shrunken while the polyester side did not.

Once your fabric is washed and dried, iron the fabric to get the wrinkles out. Since I used cotton, I used the cotton setting on my iron. The wrinkles in the terry cloth were tougher and I had to resort to use the steam setting. It worked like a charm.

Measure out and cut a rectangle of 10" x 18" onto your fabric pieces. Pin the right sides of your printed fabric and terry cloth together.

Sew the rectangles together with a 1/2 inch seam. On one end of the burp cloth leave an opening of approximately 1 inch. As you can see in the picture I placed a tag where the opening is to check the location. You then will want to trim the corners off the burp cloth to cut down on the bulk of fabric in the corners when you turn it inside out. Be sure not to cut into the seam.

Turn your burp cloth inside out so your right side of your cloth is facing you.

Push the corners out. I placed my finger inside the burp cloth and pushed the corners out.

Iron out the burp cloth and press the seams down.

If you want to put in a tag now is the time to place it in the opening. Using a 1/4" seam I started my top stitch with the tag and continued all the way around the burp cloth and finished with a reverse across the tag.

Use a lint roller to remove all the lint from the burp cloths. The terry cloth produced a lot of lint when I had cut the fabric.

Use the iron for any touch ups.

Thanks for taking the time to read my first Instructable. This is an easy project for a beginner in sewing.