Final Ekka Entry! Baby Burlap Doll Travel Cradle

Here is the last of my entries for the Ekka craft competition this year. For the Childrens Toy section I have made a Baby Burlap Doll Travel Cot.

    

This small bag, opens out and inverts into a stand up doll cradle!

I would like to claim credit for the ingenious design behind this cradle, but I can’t. A friend of mine recently showed me a knitted version that she had been given as a child. It was one of her favourite toys as a child and she had not seen anything like it since.

So I took it upon myself to create a Burlap Version. The great thing about sewing and crafting with Burlap is that you can use it to give your projects real structure and form. If you were to make this out of cotton, it would collapse when turned into the cradle position. But using Burlap, it stands really well.

I hope the judges at the show appreciate the dual functionality of this cradle. The Ekka starts next week, so I’ll let you know how I go.

It is a bit complicated to explain how to make, so I will work on a proper sewing pattern and put it in my pattern store soon.

This cradle got me to thinking about my favourite toys as a child. Most of the really memorable favourites were handmade. The timber crib for my dolls and washing line that my Uncle Dave made me, Maxi and Mini dolls that Uncle Dave’s Mum made me. What were your favourite handmade toys as a child? Have you made them for your kids? Let me know. I think we should restart the handmade toy movement! I’d love to hear about your handmade toys as I think my boys could do with some Handmade love!

Baby Smash Cake Photo Shoot using Burlap as a Photo Backdrop

So April is birthday month in our house. Three out of five of us celebrate our birthdays in April (I’m not one of them), so that means plenty of parties and cake, and planning for me!Harry was turning one and we wanted to make it a special occasion, so we gave him a smash cake.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Smash Cake trend, you basically make a beautiful cake for your baby and then let them ‘Smash it’ to pieces whilst you stand by photographing each candid moment! My seven year old was horrified that we would ‘waste cake’ like that! But as I explained to him, it’s not like a one year old really gets to eat the cake so this was a way for Harry to enjoy his birthday in a one year old kind of way.

I made him a chocolate cake with vanilla icing (looks better in the pictures than chocolate!), topped with blueberries, some blue fairy floss, a paper number 1 and a balloon.

We set the stage on the back deck and I needed a backdrop for the shoot. As Burlap abounds in our house, I had just purchased 5 metres of Burlap, which was perfect for the backdrop. I draped it over the deck handrail and down onto the floor and then positioned the cake on top.

The Burlap worked really well as a back drop. It was cost effective, reflected and diffused the natural light really well, and best of all easy to clean with just a hose off. It also provided a really neutral background which allowed the baby and the cake to be the feature in the photos rather than backdrop. I think it would really well in a number of settings. You could use it for weddings or family photos when the photo is about the subjects rather than the location.

Here’s how the shoot turned out.

Harry is actually a bit of a neat freak and once he felt the icing on his hands he didn’t want to touch it again and was more interested in the balloon, but I think he had a great time anyway, and we have some lovely keepsake photos.