DIY Nursing Pads

I read somewhere that letting your blog be too broad was like a kiss of death for popularity, but I think at this point I am just going to give in and post whatever the heck I want! I'm sure I'll make a writing post again soon. :)

Until then, mom glasses are back on!

I spent all evening last night discovering how to thread and use a serger. It was really hard. I got all sweaty and frustrated, and even though my mom and husband were sitting at the table with me, I might have uttered a few curses under my breath trying to thread the blasted thing with a pair of tweezers and whatever remnant of patience my children hadn't already sucked out of me for the day. Have you ever seen a serger?

LOOK AT THAT THING. When I brought it out of the closet, my husband said he felt intimidated and he wasn't even doing anything with it. It's my mom's, but she's not entirely sure how it works either. She bought it to make curtains, and after she sort of successfully fumbled her way through hemming them, she forgot how she did it in the first place.

I was on my own.

But I did finally figure it out (after two Youtube tutorials, reading the manual, and ruining a lot of fabric scraps), and set out to make my first project.

Nursing pads!

So glamorous. I know, it's borderline TMI to share my nursing pads with you, but dude. They're cute. And I worked really hard to figure out how to make them! I'm all about making my own stuff for half the price of the items I find on Etsy, so I'd call this a success. $10 for 17 pairs of cloth nursing pads? Steal. Stolen, my friends. (Along with like 4 hours of my life, and a dollop of my sanity).

I kind of used a plethora of tutorials to give myself a base for making these, and gleaned my favorite parts from each of them to make my own version. I see a lot of tutorials that shape these into cones, but I didn't do that last time I made these (sans serger. It was actually harder to use a zigzag stitch on a regular machine in the end), and I didn't really feel like taking the extra step. I'm lazy like that.

These are made with two layers of flannel, one layer of fleece, and another layer of flannel on the back to make it pretty. I used a CD as my guide for cutting the circles, and I HIGHLY recommend the use of a rotary cutter when cutting out all these circles. It goes a lot faster. Then I just stacked them on top of each other in the correct order, and blundered my way through serging them. The stitching isn't pretty, but they'll hold! I'm sure I'll get better at this stuff as I go.

So there you have it! That's what I've been up to last night and this morning.

But I really should get back to finishing that book I've been writing for almost a year...