The Best Baby Shower Activity

by Huntley in Instructional / 09.10.08

For those among us that don’t want to guess what chocolate candy is melted into a diaper or sample baby food or estimate the belly measurements of a woman who is undoubtedly uncomfortable with her burgeoning waistline already, I have a great new baby shower activity suggestion: felt appliqué onesies! Felt is great for this because it comes in plenty of brilliant colors and designs but doesn’t fray like normal fabrics will. If you go with another fabric, you’ll have to sew down the designs (well - and with one of a few particular types of stitches).

I’ve actually done this at a couple showers at my house now and am completely in love with my baby shower innovation! The process is pretty simple and pretty cheap. Plus, if you structure it correctly (e.g. with appropriately selected cookie cutters), you can get even the least creative and artistic attendees to put out something that the baby won’t be ashamed to sport proudly.

A few tips:

1. You’ll need a craft area for this, and unless you have lots of space and lots of scissors, you’ll likely want to have it adjacent to eating/present areas so folks don’t all have to be working at the same time on making their onesie present.

2. Have people write their initials (with sharpie marker) on the tags inside the onesie or on the inside of the onesie behind the appliqued felt so the expectant mother can later tell who made which one. (Make sure they’re careful doing this and don’t end up getting permanent marker elsewhere on the onesie)

3. Purchase a selection of onesie sizes so the new baby gets some new duds for different times in his or her young life.

4. Encourage people to think through the seasons/holidays will coincide with different age ranges for the baby. A summery onesie will be better for summertime than wintertime. Similarly, no one is going to be as excited about the onesie that fits in August but is long-sleeve and cutely adorned with snowflakes or a scary Halloween ghost. If all of the cookie cutters you have are seasonal, you can easily find tons more online that can be purchased for pretty cheap. It may even be worth it to go in with a friend on these if you’ll both be hosting a few showers over the next few years.

5. Try dyeing some of the oneseies beforehand with Rit dye - I’d recommend doing it on the stove (in a pot you can bleach and with a stirrer that you don’t mind ruining with dye). The colors make the onesie infinitely cuter and are pretty simple to come by. The dye tends to give the onesies that vintage T-shirt look where the white stitching shows up a bit more and the color is slightly but not noticeably irregularly colored. Know that, given the option, almost everyone will opt for a dyed onesie.

6. You don’t have to go beyond just ironing the appliqué down (with the adhesive), but if you have someone that’s reasonably comfortable sewing, they definitely will look more polished if you stitch around the edges of the designs. If you opt not to sew them down, make sure they’re well adhered post-ironing.

Good luck with it - lemme know how it goes for you! Check out the video (here) for almost 19 minutes of my tips and tidbits and directions on how to actually go through the felt applique process! It’s free to view as an example throughout the duration of our Baby Formula instructional video contest, which you should all enter incidentally! If you’re looking for help on getting started with your first MindBites video so that you can enter this contest, check out our Teach page, which is full of resources to help you out!