Hand Print Crafts

Today my baby is six months old so this is the perfect post!  Over the past couple of weeks I seen a lot of blog post for Father's Day gift ideas. When I saw this Quilted Hand Print and thought it was completely brilliant and then I found this Felt Hand Tree posted and thought that was also a very cute variation.  These were just too cute for me to pass up the idea. And forget them being a Father's Day gift, I decided to try and make something similar for myself so I can always remember how small my little boy is right now.

This is how my variation turned out:

This probably wont come as a surprise to anyone, but it's extremely difficult to get a 6 month old to hold his hand still long enough to trace it. I don't know how I managed, but I did and I only got one of his hands so I just used the same hand flipped over to do the second one. So, I traced one of his hands on a pieced of paper. I cut it out and traced two hands and stenciled my letters on some iron on wonder under and ironed it to my striped fabric. I cute out my shapes and then peeled of the wonder under paper and ironed the shapes to the white fabric. 

If you look closely you can see that I went around the shapes with a zig zag stitch to give it a more finished look and also did an outline with a straight stitch about 1/4 inch away for a little bit of texture. I sewed all my patches together to make the front. Then I made some loops and pined them between the front layer and back layer and stitched all together. Then I took my scissors and snipped the little ruffly flaps. I chose to sew everything to give it the ruffly frayed look thinking it would help hide the fact that I have issues sewing straight lines. I cut a wooden dowel to size and stuck it through the loops so I could hang it on the wall or for the moment on Timothy's bedroom door.  I think it turned out pretty cute.