recovering

...not from any sickness or injury or, you know, childbirth-type event. that's not how i'm recovering (though it would be a handy explanation of the unusually long blog absence). what i'm recovering is actually baby gear.

like the generations of stupid-ass brides (me among them) who have told their poor bridesmaids, "oh you will totally be able to wear this dress (that i am forcing you to buy) again and again," i told myself that a lot of the stuff we got for judah would be fine to use for a girl too if we ever had one. not because it was pink or anything, but just because it wasn't crazy boy-ish with tractors or baseballs or something. yeah, i was wrong about that too.

enter the first of my 3 major recovering projects.

see, it's not that it would be outrageous for layla to use the stuff as-is, it's just that i want her to have some things that were picked especially for her, just like judah got. i am already fearing that one day she will look back through the holographic 3D family albums (after a day at the hoverboard park) and see all of the showers and parties we had for judah when i was pregnant and wonder, "well, why weren't there any for me? were they not excited to meet me?" NEVER fear, oh daughter of mine, we are utterly excited to meet you, we just don't need or want the same things that we did when we were becoming parents for the very first time.

so a few big baby items that i never intended to re-girl-ify have been yanked out of their autumn slumber in the attic and put to the harsh point of my seam-ripper. first up: ze boppy.

i was going to just take a picture of the original boppy before i started sewing, but then i thought you (aka i) would rather see it with a tiny judah week-old bug nestled in its downy pincers instead.

so yeah. i got this boppy and the cover used off of ebay when i was like 10 minutes pregnant (we were a little excited to become parents). i loved the bold blue for either sex and the colorful sailboats that i may or may not have thought were rockets. i guess i still would have used it if he had been a girl, but now it just seems so judah. let the laylafication commence.

ok but first, one more "before" picture containing one minuscule judah bug.

nothing like a weensy suspicious mummy larvae to get the nostalgia flowing

and now prepare ye the way for your "after." the little padded horseshoe of milky and nappy delight that miss layla-boo will be spending many hours in, on and around (no worries, the coffee table will be pledged before her arrival...mom):

i love these fabrics so much that i can't even express it. so many of my favorite sewers have used these in their projects and i finally tracked some down for myself (like 3 years after the trend)

i couldn't commit to just one of the fabs, and since the boppy is assembled with a horizontal seam anyway, i thought i'd just make it flippable and subject to my fanciful whims of which pattern i want to look at during any given feeding...cause i'm customyzed like that, fools. the two fabrics are from amy butler's lotus collection so the reds and the base off-white color match perfectly.

LOVE this. so feminine without a stitch of pink or a heart in sight

charcoal, sky blue, cherry red and gold. looooooooooove.

so when/if she ever complains about us getting newer/nicer stuff for baby judah than we did for her, i can direct her to THIS post, in the laser-plasma interweb archives. "see lay-lay face, judah had a mass-produced and USED boppy cover, whereas yours was one of a kind and hand-made. now please eat your proton powder." my visions for the future come strictly from the most well-respected scientific journals and not exclusively from the back to the future franchise and the jetsons. please count on them.

funnily enough, i went to try out the new one and put the boppy in nursing position around my artist-formerly-known-as waist. my fit-me-like-a-glove, hate-to-nurse-without it U-shaped buddy was awkward and uncomfortable and wouldn't sit right no matter what i did. gasp. i first freaked out that i had messed up the cover so badly that i deformed the pillow. and then i thought, "geez, am i that much bigger than i was with judah that this totally doesn't fit at all!?!?" and then i remembered that boppies aren't really for use by chicks that are 8 months pregantic and that i wouldn't need it until the baby was out of me. clever problem solver. crisis averted.

so while i may be behind the sewing times in using this fabric collection, i could not be happier with my choices. unfortunately, for the second recovering project, i got a little crazy and the fabrics are a tad on the insanely girly side; as in lisa frank crossed with a diarrheal carebear, and i'm having inklings that i may have wandered into the sticky mire of tackidom. the last thing i want is something that looks like the brainchild prototype from the tila tequila & mariah carey baby collection. that project's almost finished, just a few wee details (sparkles! puffballs! ricrac!) and then you can witness the, ROY G BIV-a-palooza that i have created. it already has about 7 hours of work invested in it, so there's now turning back now...see ya soon, mimi and titi.

glarg! i just remembered that i forgot to subtly insert this into the post so it didn't look like bragging, but i did the project with no pattern or tutorial. that may be a first...i can't remember. i just looked at the old boppy cover and built my own pattern from there using just my hands and brain matter...i didn't even end up having to take the old one apart into pieces so it's totally usable again. this is a big deal to me. there. bragging documented.