Crinkly Textures Baby Toy

I always feel like I'm neglecting my eight month old when it comes to my creative projects. My three year old gets all the goods, and my poor little one has no idea that she's missing out. Well not today! I set out to make something especially for her.

My oldest has some play money that's made out of fabric and has plastic inside to make it crinkle when you play with it. My youngest loves getting her hands on it, so I decided to make her something similar but more interesting. Here's what I came up with...

The front is linen with seven rainbow colored cotton squares patched in the middle. I wanted the front to be colorful and visually stimulating. I love the way this looks. In fact, I love it so much that I used it to create a button for my blog! Go take a look in my sidebar.

The back is a patchwork of four different fabrics. The top row is brown minky dots and some cute matryoshka doll Japanese linen. The bottom row is yellow wool felt and brown/blue polka dot flannel. I wanted the back to have lots of different textures and have each block feel different in her hands. 

I cut out a rectangle from the center of the wool felt block (OK it's not exactly in the center, but it was when I cut it out!) and placed a piece of hippo fabric on the back and sewed around the very edges of the hole in the wool felt to keep the hippos in place. I love that the hippo on the bottom looks like he's about to take a bite out of the other hippo's butt! I'm not sure what kind of fabric the hippos are printed on. It almost feels like a canvas. I got it in a scrap pack of Japanese fabric a while back, which is really fun to buy because you end up with so many cute little pieces of fabric! Just do an Etsy supply search for Japanese fabric scraps.

And I love this matryoshka doll linen. I've been waiting to do something with it, and I decided to use some of it for this project because it's so colorful and cute.

Before I sewed it all together, I took an empty cereal bag, washed and dried it, cut it to size, and sewed it to the inside of the toy. Now it crinkles when my daughter plays with it, which is what really gets her excited about this toy. And it makes a little bit of noise without being annoying like some toys can be.

The end result... my eight month old loves it. She's been throwing it across the floor all afternoon and slithering (yes, she slithers like a snake to get around) after it. Glad I took pictures before I gave it to her because it is now soaking wet.

Thanks for stopping by today! I'm still working on the Niblet doll tutorial, but it will be posted soon! The Niblet doll tutorial is HERE!