Tutorial: applique baby clothes

I'm making a baby quilt for my friend's imminent new arrival, and I had a few scraps of fabric left after making the quilt top. A few of them will go into making the back, but I wanted to make a few things to give to her at the baby shower, since I won't be delivering the quilt until after the baby's born.

I went to Mothercare and bought a mixed "starter pack" of plain white baby clothes, size 0-3 months. I can't find the link to the exact pack online, but the one I bought had a little shirt, a onesie, two sleep suits, a hat, two pairs of baby mittens, and a bib. FYI, this set should come with a health warning. Caution: may cause irrational "OHMYGOD that's so TINY! And so CUTE!" moments, especially after prewashing and when hanging on the line.

Anyway, be careful.

After my heart rate returned to normal, I fussy-cut some of the Tufted Tweets (I think this one is called Itty Bitty Chairs, colour Sorbet.) I pinned the chairs to the middle of the shirt, then fired up the sewing machine. 

Because the shirt was so small (see issues, above), I removed the cover on my sewing machine's base (I think you're supposed to do this for sleeves). I set the stitch length to 1 (at the long end of my buttonhole setting) and picked the medium-width zigzag.

Off we go! In the corners, I went all the way until the needle was at the edge of the corner on the outside (the bottom right in the picture above), before I turned the shirt with the needle down and kept on going.

Ta-da! All finished. I overlapped the beginning and the end, then brought all the threads to the inside of the shirt where I knotted them and then snipped the ends. I snipped the threads hanging over on the front of the shirt, and it was ready to go. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. I'm definitely going to keep a stash of onesies for quick baby gifts. LOVE them.

I had such fun making it, I made a second one. And then put the first one on Flickr, where Laurie Wisbrun (who designed Tufted Tweets) commented on it. Squee!

And then wrapped them up with a red ribbon and put them in the mail!