Yellow Baby Crib Bumpers

Pub­lished 06/01/2014

Phew! Just in time! After 8 hours of cut­ting, pin­ning, bast­ing, and sewing, I fin­ished the baby bumpers just before the birth of my first niece/nephew! (My sis­ter is keep­ing the gen­der and name a sur­prise. Hence the yel­low and gray baby room col­ors!)

My sis­ter searched for crib bumpers online and in stores, but the bumpers she found and liked were around $200. So (of course), she comes run­ning to me for my ser­vices! My sis­ters and I all have artis­tic tal­ents, so we usu­al­ly barter between one anoth­er. With this par­tic­u­lar sis­ter, she is a tal­ent­ed painter and pho­tog­ra­ph­er and there­fore in exchange for these bumpers, she offered to do the next pho­to shoot (which will like­ly be some of my new bridal pieces). How­ev­er, I sure­ly got the short end of the stick here. These bumpers took me 8 hours to create!

My sis­ter sup­plied the fab­ric, pip­ing, batting/foam, and pat­tern. This was very help­ful! I’ve come to real­ize that the ini­tial design­ing of a product/garment with cus­tomers can take longer than the actu­al time it takes to sew the final piece.

She spent around $50 on mate­ri­als: 4 pack­ages of bias pip­ing (Four pack­ages wasn’t enough, so I only added pip­ing to the out­er edge of the bumpers), 3 yards of uphol­stery fab­ric, one pack­age of 1” foam bat­ting, and a pattern.

(Above is the Hob­by Lob­by receipt sans the address.)

My sis­ter bought a pat­tern for me to fol­low, but it was worth­less. It’s kind of point­less to even buy a pat­tern for this project any­ways. The com­mer­cial pat­tern instruct­ed the read­er to make bumpers by using one large piece of fab­ric and fold­ing it over (right sides togeth­er) and stitch­ing along the ends. This seems easy- right? Well, I don’t think this pat­tern would’ve worked so well with 1” foam and thick fab­ric! So instead I made the bumpers with­out a pat­tern and made them the same way as out­door chair cushions.

After cre­at­ing my sister’s bumpers, my mom showed me the bumpers my Babcha made when my sis­ter was a baby. I noticed that my Babcha made the bumpers with one piece of fab­ric (with one seam at the bot­tom and sides). My Babcha also used foam, but I think the one large piece of fab­ric worked well for her because it wasn’t as thick as my sister’s foam and the fab­ric was a thin cotton.

After cre­at­ing my sister’s bumpers, my mom showed me the bumpers my Babcha made when my sis­ter was a baby. I noticed that my Babcha made the bumpers with one piece of fab­ric (with one seam at the bot­tom and sides). My Babcha also used foam, but I think the one large piece of fab­ric worked well for her because it wasn’t as thick as my sister’s foam and the fab­ric was a thin cotton.

I had to mea­sure and cut very care­ful­ly and used lots of pins while sewing because if any rec­tan­gle was just a lit­tle off it would throw off the entire piece! This project took a lot of time for some­thing that first appeared to be so sim­ple & quick to make. Over­all, I was hap­py with the results and glad the baby didn’t come before I finished!

Here are more pho­tos of the baby’s room!