Burp Cloth Tutorial: Casual Pleated

My very first tutorial!! Yay for me!! I'm excited to share with you my take on the burp cloth. I call it Casual Pleated because the trim is pleated in a very casual way.

Materials needed:

Prewashed, prefolded baby diapers. I used the Gerber brand as that seems to be what is readily available.
Several strips of fabric in fun colors.

Thread. I used white but a contrast thread might be fun.

Iron/ironing board

Sewing machine, scissors, pins, etc.

The first thing I did was to prewash the diapers and fabric. I certainly didn't want to have puckering due to shrinkage after all my hard work. I then tore (I'm a fabric tearing kind of gal, but you can cut with your rotary cutter) several strips of fabric. Mine were 45" long taking advantage of the width of the fabric. The width depended on my whim. This was going to be a free form type project so I just went with it and made the width between about 1-1/2 inches and up to about 3". You can certainly be more exact but I went more casual.

I then went to the ironing board and folded one of the long edges in a little more than half way, just past the center and pressed it down nice and neat. Then I took the opposite long end and folded it lapping over the edge of the other fold so that it was lapping in the center and ironed it flat. I then turned up both ends and ironed them down.Determine a line to follow on your diaper so that the placement is straight. I eye balled it, but use whatever means needed to mark the diaper so that your trim is stitched nice and straight. I then lined up a short edge of the trim along the side edge of the diaper and began stitching down the middle of the trim folding up the fabric every so often creating a pleat. An important note is that you may not use the entire length of the fabric, so when you are getting close to the end you can cut the trim about 1 to 1-1/2 inches away from the end of the diaper and tuck under the raw end and make one last pleat by folding it up to match the pleat (that sounds confusing and I'll post a revision with pictures later on. One could even wrap it around to the back side and tuck under and catch it up in the stitching as you finish the pleat.It will look something like this. Don't worry about pleats being uneven. That is the whole idea -- to be casual. I then went on to add another strip preparing it the same way at the ironing board only making it narrower for a little variety. I then decided where to place it and sewed it down in the same way I did the first pleat.I now have 2 pleated trims. Looking pretty good.
I went on to add a 3rd fabric, again a tad smaller then the 2nd strip preparing it in the same way at the ironing board and sewing it down in casual pleated fashion.
The final result.
Sew Happy,

Suzie