DIY Baby carriers

DIY stands for Do It Yourself. I’m not there watching you buy your fabric or thread your sewing machine. You will be making your own carrier and you will be the one responsible for it. Make sure you really read through tutorials for the type of carrier you wish to make so that you can decide whether you are confident in their methods, before deciding to carry them out. Brand carriers undergo extensive testing to ensure they are safe. Not each individual carrier though, the testing methods used will damage and destroy the carrier being tested. Companies then know that other carriers made using the same materials in the same method will produce a carrier that can handle the tested amount of weight and use. If you try and test your carrier by carrying excessive weights and jumping around or forcibly tugging on straps etc, you are weakening and possibly damaging that carrier. No carrier will last forever, visually check your carrier for worn spots and frayed threads. This should be done regularly whether a bought carrier or a DIY one. You are of course welcome to make two identical carriers and destroy one via testing to see how much they can handle and then use the untested one. I wouldn’t though, I prefer to simply use tried and true methods of carrier construction. I’m lazy that way

SPOC – Simple piece of cloth

The easiest type of babywearing DIY requires no sewing, cutting or even shopping. Go to your bathroom. Pick up a clean towel. Tada! You have a carrier. I am not even kidding. Google “torso carry with a towel” there are are youtube videos, blog posts and images. You can also try “torso carry kanga” to see how it was derived from a traditional african method of babywearing. You may also have a sarong, shawl or “wrap” suitable to do a “rebozo” carry with. That’s a one shoulder carry traditionally used in Mexico, but similar carries are also found in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands. If you have a piece of fabric around 1.5m long and 1.4m wide and with a good bias stretch, (a friend of mine has a picnic blanket that is perfect for this), you can do a Peruvian “Manta” carry. I’m hoping to do a follow up blog post on Found Babywearing, so will go into more detail then.

With a pair of sling rings (local vendors sell them or you can buy direct from http://www.slingrings.com/) you can turn a SPOC into a No Sew Ring Sling.

Stretchy Wrap

No sewing required, you can simply cut cotton knit fabric to make a stretchy wrap, suitable for wrapping new borns to around 5 months (depending on size of child etc). After that they tend to get saggy and uncomfortable. Commercial stretchies vary a bit in size from 55-70cm wide and 4.5-5.5m long. When I cut stretchies I go for 60-70cm wide (it depends how wide the fabric I’m cutting is) and around 5m long, tapering the last meter on each end to make tying the knot easier. Here’s a couple of tutorials:

UK Vendor Victoria Sling Lady using metric measurements and has no diagrams. American Blogger, Ruby Stiletto uses imperial measurements and has a diagram illustrating how to cut the tapers.

Woven Wrap

You need to be able to cut a long straight line, tapers and hem them all. Really, the hardest thing about making a DIY woven is buying suitable fabric. The majority of commercial (german style) wovens are made of a purpose woven fabric in a cross-twill weave. I have never seen fabric like that for sale at a fabric store. However, wrap manufacturer Colimaçon & Cie (C&C) sell their wrap fabric by the meter and have sales every few months. It’s not the cheapest DIY, but it will be exactly like a commercially available woven, because the fabric is the same. Otherwise, if you are looking to source fabric locally, what you are looking for is medium-bottom weight fabric (like you’d use to make sturdy pants), preferably made from cotton or linen (maybe a blend), with a good bias stretch (but no stretch along the straight grain). That bias stretch is important as it is what helps the fabric mould around the shape of you and your baby. The weave will either be a loosish plain weave (a nice linen suiting could work well) or a type of twill weave (herringbone weaves, eg ticking, can be good). Lenda fabric, from IKEA has a bit of a DIY following.

Woven wraps come in many lengths, from 2.8m to 5.2m. If you are just after a “shorty”, a table cloth can be a good source of material. Some DIYers will say that you can sew two shorter pieces of fabric together with a french seam to make a longer fabric. I don’t recommend this. When you use a woven wrap, you pull and tug on it stressing that seam in multiple directions. That’s not safe in my books. DIYing a woven wrap is not always the cheapest option. Some of the fabric I found on a recent shopping trip was $15/m. If sewing a 4.6m wrap, you need to add another 30cm for tapers, another 5cm for hem (4.95m) and then your fabric is likely to shrink 10% in the wash (ALWAYS PREWASH) before you chop and sew, so you better buy 5.5m. 5.5 x 15 =$82.50. Then add on your Gutermann (or Metler etc) thread, a fresh needle in your sewing machine etc, petrol and time spent going to shop and you still have to actually cut and sew the thing. Guess what, you can buy new woven wrap for $85 (AUD). Of course you might get the perfect fabric on sale so:

This tute from You’re Sew Crafty gives measurements in cm/m and yards and inches. She also lists various common wrap “sizes”. Babywearer MD mentions dyeing wraps in her tute. Jan Andrea’s tutorial is on shortening an existing wrap, but it has an illustration showing the shape of a standard wrap (parallelogram) and uses photos to show you how to sew those tapers.

Ring Sling

Jan Andrea of Sleeping Baby Productions makes Ring Slings, lots of Ring Slings and she has kindly made and maintains a website with a lot of babywearing DIY info, but especially on Ring Slings. She talks about fabric, rings, using multiple layers, different shoulders with *video tutorials* for some of them even. Please, go look at her website. She even has an article on no-sew Ring Slings.

Sling rings can be bought from a variety of local australian vendors, or you can order directly from slingrings.com.

Pouch Sling

Pouch slings require more sewing than the above DIYs, but the fabric is easy to find as you don’t need the elusive mouldability people are looking for in woven wraps (and increasingly in ring slings). It’s also possible to make them with a sturdy strength layer (eg printed cotton duck) and then line them in that pretty quilting cotton. Pouch slings are non-adjustable, so you really must ensure you get a good fit. A pouch sling should still meet TICKS guidelines for use. I couldn’t find any tutorials that used metric measurements, you’ll have to convert.

Jan Andrea has lots of diagrams in her tutorial. Stacie Steadman as a more streamlined tute. The Stand and Deliver tutorial features padded edges.

Asian Styled Carriers (Podaegi and Mei Tai)

Podaegi and Mei Tai are both common use terms for carriers based on traditional asian baby carriers. Podaegi are Korean babycarriers made with a central “blanket” or panel with two straps that come off it and wrap around the mother and child. People in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam use similar carriers, but have different names for them. This style of carrier has also been nick named a “Pod”. With a Pod, the majority of the child’s weight is carried by the straps, so the “blanket” can be of a lighter weight fabric than the rest of the Pod.

Mei Tai is one term for a traditional chinese baby carrier (still commonly used today) that has a body panel with four straps coming off it. The top two straps will go over the wearer’s shoulders, the bottom two straps will go around the wearer’s waist. They can be constructed in a variety of ways (padding, length of straps, hoods, head rests). No matter the add-ons etc, it is important with Pod and Mei Tai that any seams have adequate seam allowances (shoulder straps will often be sunk 10-15cm into the body of the carrier) and serious stitching to hold straps etc in place. X-boxes and bar-tacking are two common methods of securing shoulder straps.

Kristin has done a straight strapped Pod tutorial at Life and Lessons on a Happy Homestead. She assumes previous sewing experience. Making a Wrap-pod is about making a Pod with wrap straps. Jennifer has posted two different construction methods. An Angled strap Pod tute at Sew She Sews.

Mei Tai from a tablecloth. Has unpadded “wrap straps” and hidden x-boxes! Tutorial from Fine and Fair. The A Fuller Day tutorial is for a mei tai with padded waist band, padded shoulders straps and also has a hood that converts to a headrest. The Scandi Tute has a mei tai with padded waist and shoulders, a flat hood and hidden X-boxes.

Becoming Mamas have a two-part tutorial on making a Mei-tai or Onbu (yet another asian style carrier, but this time instead of a waist band, you have rings and the shoulder straps turn into a waist band!!) featuring bar-tacking. She also illustrates a method for doing padded to wrap straps.

NZ Vendor, Woven, sell a Mei Tai pattern, with options for wrap straps, padded to wrap straps, at least two hood styles, a darted or flat body.

SSC

You want to try making a carrier with foam, webbing and buckles. Well, I’ve made a SSC and it is not easy. Materials can be difficult to source, you can’t just use buckles you found at the local craft store, they haven’t been weight tested and those buckles will come apart under stress. Fastex brand buckles have a good rep and are sold by Australian vendor, Karri Tree Lane, sells fastex buckles for Babywearing DIY purposes. NZ Vendor, Woven sells both webbing and buckles. Paskal are a vendor for industrial fabrics and accessories and sell weight tested webbing and fastex buckles. Their website is a bit confusing though and I’m not sure on minimum orders. MRecht accessories sell some nice looking webbing. I don’t know about their buckles though, you’ll have to ask if they are weight tested.

There’s a SSC pattern free to download here. The page has heaps of ads, but it’s been shared on many Babywearing DIY hotspots. Laura posts about how she has sewn it here. Karin has also sewn it and she’s done a tutorial! You can buy a SSC pattern download on etsy from SweetPod.

Wabisabi baby calls this the Ultimate Mei Tai Carrier. It has buckles and webbing and isn’t exactly a Mei Tai or SSC. It also has links to purchase a more detailed pattern/instructions as well as the notions etc to use.

Babywearing DIY Hotspots

Seriously, go look at Jan Andrea of Sleeping Baby Production’s page. It’s awesome and just a click away.

TBW aka TheBabyWearer.com has an amazing DIY Forum that contains years of knowledge and advice on all aspects of Babywearing DIY.

If you are on Facebook, there are a few groups you might enjoy: Babywearing DIY Advice and Support, mostly US DIYers, has excellent files. Woven DIY is an NZ based DIY group which also offers support for people using DIY patterns and kits from Woven, the vendor. Dyed Babycarriers is for people who are dyeing their babycarriers, be they wraps or commercial SSCs that need jazzing up. If you have a floor loom taking up space in your living room, you might like the group Warped Wrappers. It’s for weavers and babywearers interesting in weaving wraps.

Conclusion

Remember when buying fabric that natural fibres often shrink in the first wash, often losing around 10% of length.

Always prewash your fabric. You don’t want to spend time making your carrier to have it shrink and buckle weirdly when it first gets wet. DIY stands for Do It Yourself. Your research, your sewing, your materials, your child, your responsibility and finally your pride and joy.

Have you made your own carrier? What were the challenges you faced?

Thankyou to Rachael from Babywearing Victoria Inc for allowing this post to be reproduced. Original can be found here