A few months back I attended a ‘story-telling’ themed baby shower for an old school friend of mine. I thought it was a good opportunity to try my hand at making something new, and after finding some neutral coloured fabric with vintage style nursery rhyme illustrations I decided to make her new bub a fleece-backed blankie and matching taggie.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with taggies, they are simply small pieces of fabric with loads of ribbon loops sewn around the edges. If you’ve ever watched a small child play with a soft toy, no doubt you’ve noticed that they are drawn to the tags, in the same way that slightly larger children tend to favour the packaging of toys over the treasure inside! New-ish babies love to suck on these silky satin tags or loop their fingers through them as their fine motor skills begin to develop. I guess at some point, somewhere, a clever crafter figured well why not make the tags the main feature of the soft toy!
Here’s the taggie with loops of green, red and gold ribbon sewn around the edges:
I’ve been wanting to add some sort of label or brand to the things I’ve made but I haven’t felt justified in purchasing any so for this project I used some wooden letter stamps (from an old letter press) and some fabric paint to create my own ‘smo’ tags. They’re pretty basic but I reckon they’re a bit spesh!
I can’t remember the exact size of the blanket but it was roughly one metre square, large enough to use as a cot blanket or for a bub to use on the floor for tummy time. It was a bit hard to part with this one, as is often the case with the things I make, but now that I’ve got baby number three on the way I’ve got a good reason to make another one!
:: smo design :: 
We love the blanket and use it ALL THE TIME. And bub is just getting into the taggy now, she finds it delicious!