DIY Nursing Cover

I'm sure you must have thought I'd given up crafts and DIY projects but I promise I haven't! It's been a little crazy with the house stuff and I had been working on some crafts I couldn't share until they were gifted. This is one of those.

I decided to try my hand at making a nursing cover for a pregnant friend as part of her baby shower gift. It seemed simple enough minus the boning which I had not worked with before and I found 2 great tutorials that I kind of meshed together to take the best of both based on the comments/feedback. I mainly followed the Prudent Baby one but made some changes based on the Made By The MamaMonster one and both tutorials comments. They both have more step by step photos to help you out when you get to certain parts.

Materials:
- 26″ x 38″ for the cover
- 25″x 3″ for one side of the strap
- 10″ x 3″ for the other side of the strap
- 15 inches of boning
- 2  1-inch D rings

I washed and dried my fabric before starting this project since I knew it was something that might get thrown in the wash frequently and didn't want there to be any shrinking after I made it.

Cut your fabric pieces.

Fold the strap pieces in half lengthwise (hot dog style) right sides together. Pin and sew together with a 1/4 inch seam for the shorter strap.  Do the same for the longer strap but when you get about 3 inches away from the end sew in a curve toward the folded corner (like this photo below from MamaMonster). This is so the d ring won't come loose when it is pulled on.

Trim the curved seam and turn both strap pieces inside out. This will take some patience. Iron flat with the seam in the middle.

Then take one edge of the short strap and fold it over 1/4" and iron. Insert your d rings and fold fabric again over top of the d ring and pin. Sew in place with a strong stitch or a few lines of stitching.

On the bottom edge of your cover fabric piece, fold 1/2" and iron and then another 1/2" and iron. Sew using a straight stitch at 1/4" seam allowance. On the two perpendicular shorter side do the same thing.

Fold the top edge over 1/2" and iron. Then another 1" and iron. Sick of ironing yet?

Find the center of the top edge and measure 6 1/2" in both directions and pin. To make the casing for your boning, sew a straight stitch between your two pins. Feed in the boning with the curve out to the right side of your fabric- it should hang out about an inch on each side.

Pin as best as you can in place and sew a few stitches at the center to secure it from sliding. Any time my needle was going through the boning I walked my presser foot since it was pretty thick and I didn't want to break a needle.

Here is the trickiest part. Insert the straps right side up underneath that one inch of boning that was sticking out on each side of your finished casing. The biggest feedback on the nursing cover was that the boning falls down so to prevent that you have to sew your straps into the boning. Then fold them up over the boning and hem so that you now see the seam side of your straps. If you accidentally do it on the wrong side you will kick yourself for having to rip out a bunch and start this tricky part over! Pin really well and sew with a straight stitch that forms a box for extra strength (like the photo below from Prudent Baby). Again I walked my presser foot using the hand crank when going through the boning.

Lastly, sew the remainder of the top seam in place from where you stopped previously at the 6 1/2" inch marks to the edges.

Oh and if you want you can add a pocket to the back to be used for nursing pads or a burp cloth or whatev. I just guesstimated on where to put it.. its about 1/4 of the way in from the edge and near the bottom and about 5" x 5".

Ta-da!

Since I don't have a baby and thought it might be creepy to ask to borrow one for nursing cover photos...

I present.... Baby Tiger. Yep it's a stuffed tiger just in case you thought it was the real deal. What true Clemson fan doesn't have a tiger?

The soon to be mom loved her nursing cover! I have asked for feedback from her after she uses it for awhile for any improvements needed whenever I make another one.