Swaddle Bomb

Swaddling is awesome, but can be tricky. As one of the few things I can do to soothe an upset baby, I took it seriously. So I got fairly adept at turning a blanket and a baby into a baby burrito. However there are times when the blanket is too small, or its late at night and your coordination is gone, or maybe the baby seems to have learned karate. The little rascals tend to wriggle and squirm and get their arms out of the wrap, then startle and upset themselves by getting smacked in the face by these weird uncontrollable appendages. So I figured there's got to be a more refined technique to keep a baby wrapped that doesn't involve duct tape (never managed to talk Gail into it...) So I did the Google, and found a few commercial offerings. One in particular caught my eye, and seemed like a good design. I could have ordered it, but that would have taken longer, I wanted something within a day or two. So I went to prototyping.

I call it the Swaddle Bomb, pictured here is Mark III.

To test the dimensions I took the obvious approach and used a bag of sugar and a banana.

Ava is actually both longer than this, and sweeter, but the test was still valid.

Now Mark III was pretty close, but her little monkey feet kept popping out. So I added some material to the bottom of the right wing, which worked fairly well. I adjusted the pattern to match the fabric modification, and changed the slope around the shoulders so it would be a bit more snug. Mark IV was much closer to the ... ahem ... mark.

Like a straight-jacket, but for babies.

Did I mention I learned to sew last week in order to do this? Probably not, because you'd try to beat me up and take my lunch money.