Sleep sack pattern

I have just finished two sleep sacks for the little girls for Christmas. I was totally appalled that my daughter was spending $60 for Growbags for the kids to sleep in.


Babies these days don't sleep with blankets or bumper pads or stuffed toys in their beds - all those things we used to load up the cribs with. In fact even as they get bigger they still sleep in these sleeping bag units. Miss Scarlett had a sleepover here last night and she was cruising around in her's for hours this morning, having perfected walking in a bag.


I have had a good look at the expensive store-bought ones and looked at the patterns in the books which typical for many kids patterns seemed to me to be too wide in the neck and the chest.


So I went on Etsy where the young mother sewers hang out and found this pattern, which looked to my eye to be very similar to the ones you buy. I have been picking up some of my crafty type patterns on Etsy recently and am pretty happy with the results.


Here are my two versions - prototypes for my daughter to evaluate and for me to do a better job next time. The outside is flannel and the inside a coordinating fleece which of course I realized was going to stick in the zipper teeth - so my top-stitching is a bit erratic.

The only changes I made to the design were to add a little topstitched square at the bottom of the zipper ( you put the separating zipper in upside down) - a detail I saw in the commercial ones.


I also rolled the body back so I could sew as much as possible of the lining to the zipper by machine, sort of a bagging technique, rather than rely totally on topstitching from the right side to catch the lining on the wrong side next to the zipper teeth, as was suggested by the pattern.


This sewer has been around the block enough times to know that was not going to work without angst, so I attached the lining and then did my anarchist topstitching to finish more for decorative effect and to stitch down some of that fleece fluff away from the zipper.


My list is shrinking. Only a bit of knitting and some organizational work.


I have been pondering how to fit in a large crowd to sit down for dinner on Christmas Day and yesterday I had the bright idea that because my living room is bigger than my dining room I could switch the furniture for just a few days.


I have suggested this to my returned spouse.


He has just gone off for a nap now.


Nothing like the holidays.