Adventures in Sewing: Baby Crinkle Toys

These are excellent young baby gifts.  Young babies can't really "play" with a lot of toys.  They are more rudimentary, I guess.  Grabbing is a function they learn pretty early on (two months-ish) so these soft, "make-noise-when-grabbed" toys are ideal.  They make all kinds of toys with crinkle paper in them, but the ones supposedly geared for infants also have hard parts, and that's no good.  As they have limited control and hard parts are easily jabbed into eyes or hit against heads.

The genius behind this idea was a gift that my mother gave Grady.  A little square with paper inside and ribbons around the outside.  Baby grabs it, it makes noise, and it's made out of this really soft Minkee Fabric that feels nice on baby's hand.

At Grady's two month appointment, Lewis and I were watching him on the table, and he was just wiggling all over the place, and grabbing at the paper.  He liked the noise!  So when we got home I got the square toy out, and sure enough, Grady loves it.  I really just put it on his belly and he grabs at it and pulls it to his mouth and clutches it.  Not much to it.  Well we only have one, and as I've learned, you need one and then about four spares, just in case.

So I'm looking at this thing, I can make this, no sweat.  So I started my search for Minkee fabric.  I found some today, and about an hour later, I have two little crinkle squares.  And I have to say, he likes them just as well as the store bought one.

Now mine don't have four ribbons on them.  As one - I didn't have a lot of ribbon that went with giraffe print.  And two - I'm still working that part out in my brain.  I like to stitch things outside in, and then flip them.  Stitches don't have to be as perfect this way (but I'm getting so much better!).  I'd have to hem the two sides separately, then stitch them together right side out to get four ribbons in there.  Next time.

My favorite part?  If you opened these up you'd find this:

It makes the perfect crinkle noise!