hey everyone Melanie ham here and in today's video I'm going to show you how to make a baby lovey we are finishing up our baby series if you've been following along you know that my best friend Ashley was pregnant with her second baby girl because she was pregnant because she had her baby last week and so we are so excited baby Finley is here and so I made her some levies and I'm going to show you how I constructed them the last video shows you how to do the hand stitching around a butterfly or any sort of motif or shape that you have on the fabric that you have chosen today's video I'm going to show you how I constructed two different kinds of levies using this beautiful double ballz fabric from Andover fabrics the designer is Lizzie house and I did this hand stitching on this one this is using the same technique as the hand quilting that I showed you in the last video I just did a running straight stitch instead of stitching around a motif so I'm going to show you how to do all of that if you are interested in some more quilting type of projects you can visit my free mini-course five days quilting calm that's the number five days quilting calm it's a free mini course just put in your email and I will give you access to my course on quilting so it's like a five different videos and it shares with you all sorts of different tips and tricks that I share with you on getting better at quilting so if that's something that interests you you can go to five the number five days quilting calm and check that up for now let's go ahead and go I'm going to show you how to make this beautiful baby levy what I did with this lovey with the butterfly stitching is I went ahead and placed two layers of fabric wrong sides together I basted it you can see here my safety pins that I baste it and then I went ahead and started stitching so now in order to finish this off you could do that a couple of different ways you can bind it like a quilt and that's one way to do it you can Serge it if you have a serger you can put a coordinating thread and Sur to the ends just a really great option I am going to hem the end I think that's going to be an easy way to do it and so a way that you guys might like to see so what I'm going to do is trim everything down and then we're going to iron it and create a little hem here on the end and then we're going to stitch that down so let's go ahead and do that all right here is our piece of gauze it's all trimmed up you can see how though the inner qualities of the gods-- makes it a little kind of shifty right a little bit it has some movement to it so you know just keep that in mind as you're getting ready let's let's get this ironed and ready to press and you want to use a light starch or some flattered by silk those will be good options for helping everything to stay put as you're pinning so you can really hem this any way you want you can hit it you know this way so that you see the front fabric on the backside or you could even hem it this way it depends on how you know the color combination that you are looking for both sides are spectacular so they're pretty much the same so it kind of just depends on your preference so I'm going to go ahead and do it this way so this is this is only two layers of fabric but it's actually four because each double gauze has two pieces so this will be even though it's a thin um it's a thin fabric it's going to be a little bit bulky now that it's pressed we can pin it in place and finish the rest of the sides I actually personally like to have a bulkier edging on baby blankets because of something nice for them to grip onto and they kind of like to chew on that while they're teething and then when you fold in the other sides make sure that your corners look like this you want to make sure everything is finished in here so now our lovey is pinned and ready for stitching so let's go over to the machine but first I'm going to make a second lovey I'm going to show you a second way to do it just because I like to give you guys options so really quick let's pull out the fabric and cut out a second one so since I have extra of this fabric I'm going to make a second lovey and show you guys just how it's going to look I'm going to run through really quickly since I already did the stitching demonstration so now I have trimmed all of the edges they're going to be pretty straight here's again this fabrics a little Wiggly so if you know just do your best and now I'm going to pin it in place alright so when I'm at the sewing machine working on this hem I'm also going to go ahead and stitch all the way around this one now make sure to leave yourself a several inch opening so that you can flip it out I'm also going to use a good size seam allowance which will be about 1/2 inch seam allowance and I'm going to punch my stitch lengths up for this one so let's head over to the sewing machine you you you so insert your hand and make sure that you pop out all the corners make sure everything is nice and straight in those corner pieces and then it's an ax slip to right side out and then let's give it a good press and stitch it all the way around all right now here is baby levy number two that I made it's already finished but what I'm going to do is do some really large sort of sachiko style stitching going all the way across on here just some straight lines with lots of different colors so I will show you that when I'm done the edges are finished it doesn't have as bulky of an edge on like this one now this one is complete it does have a little bit more of a bulky edge because of that hem but again I think babies actually love that they love to be able to grip onto it so two totally different styles and you can decide for yourself which one you would like to do alright so here's how the second levy is looking that I worked on I did it you know really loosely really roughly in about groups of threes so let's go ahead and finish this one up and this one it's I wanted it to be very organic very natural just load a bunch of stitches on here no big deal that's the look I was going for if you want it to be much more precise you can draw some lines with the water-soluble pen or some chalk on this fabric and then that will give you more precise lines if that's more your style now I'm going to finish it off here insert your needle just between the two layers of fabric you'll see where that knot is going to be right on the edge of the fabric here I'm going to insert our needle and help pop that knot in there there it is now this one is complete here's a bigger idea of how it looks this is the purple side and then here's the butterfly side now I'm going to go ahead and wash both of these levees in a lingerie bag in a delicate cycle of the wash because I want to I'm going to show you guys how it looks once it's been washed because this double gauze has such a special quality about it so I want to show you guys that so I will wash it and then meet back up with you all right so here are our levees taken freshly out of the dryer you can see how the double gauze kind of gets like a little bit wrinkly like a linen would be it has that sort of natural feel to it it's not a precise type of fabric and it has that quality so here's how this one's looking I washed these in a lingerie bag on the cold cycle of my washing machine on delicate and then I mostly air dried it but then I put it in with a load of towels for the last about 10 or 15 minutes of the cycle on the dryer to get it fully dry thank you so much for watching if you like this video please give me a thumbs up that's a great way to help get the word out about this video and about my projects I would really appreciate that subscribe if you are not already if you have any questions comments future video requests you can leave those down below in the comment section if you have any questions on the materials that I use or any of the things that I mentioned underneath the video is the description box cuz the about box you just click show more on a desktop device you click that and it will open up tons and tons of links are always there on all my videos if you had a mobile device there's a little arrow to the right of the title of the video and that will open it the same box on a mobile device thank you guys for watching this video I hope it was helpful for you and inspires you to create something beautiful for the baby in your life and I will see you very soon bye