Baby Girl Presents - Fleece Baby Mittens

Hi again everyone!
It's the final present for the upcoming baby girl :) I found an adorable tutorial on Pinterest and really wanted to give it a go. Again, it seems that just like with my boss' pregnancy, this would not go without hiccups.


This is what I actually ended up with... but let me show you what it was supposed to be, it's quite different!

I found this tutorial first, which shows the mittens being made with flanel and cotton lining. First of all, I couldn't find the flanel I wanted to use for this (yellow with butterflies, so cute!) so I had to use a really soft cotton instead. I still had some leftover bedding fabric left which would be perfect for the lining. So I got started, but something was missing from the instructions and I had to resew the same bit about three times. Needless to say that caused some serious sewing frustration. Then, when I finally got it all sewn up correctly, it was crooked. Honestly, I was fuming!

So I looked for another tutorial which filled in the missing bit and tried again the next day. This tutorial also had an excellent pattern in three sizes. I used the medium size as the small one really did seem tiny. I still had the lining fabric left but the soft cotton was finished, so I tried to make the mittens again with the cupcake fleece. Both pieces were now sewn straight, and I added the elastic. Can you believe that both tutorials didn't have use elastic? They had between 4" and 5" each and that was just way too tight. Usually this is not such a bad thing, but I couldn't get it out anymore to change it. Woops... So another pair for the bin. This was clearly becoming more of a challenge than I'd expected it to.  I mean, I should know how to do this!

On the third search for decent instructions, I found a blog somewhere (I can't find it anymore at the moment, but I will link to it when I find it) that didn't use lining but just used fleece and hemmed it to make the casing for the elastic. After the struggle I've had with these, it sounded perfect! I was now out of the red fleece from all the booties I made so I couldn't use that, I was out of the soft cotton, and the cupcake fleece just didn't seem thick enough to be used without lining. Luckily I still had some purple fleece left which was just enough for a couple of mittens. This one had to be it.

As plain purple felt a little bit boring, I used the decorative stitching on my lovely machine to stitch on some cute pink bows.

Here you can see the results of the battle for the perfect mittens. On the top right there are cotton ones that were crooked, on the top left you can see the fleece ones with the much-too-tight elastic, and on the bottom the purple end result.

The elastic I used here was 6" long for each mitten. Again, I have no point of reference, but it would seem less likely to cut off the baby's circulation than the other options so I think it will fit :)

Now that I have all the presents done, they just need to be wrapped. Luckily, I also found something great on Pinterest for that. I can't wait to show you! Watch this space :)

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