Infant Tie

I hope you enjoyed a few sneak peeks of the wedding weekend. We're finally catching our breath from all of the preparations. And I'm loving that a lot of the decorations came home with me. :)

In order to match his groomsman daddy, I made a tie for our two year old son. It turned out absolutely adorable and got lots of compliments at the wedding. Not to mention, my two men looked so handsome together in pictures.

So here's a quick tutorial for you. It wasn't a cinch, but it only took about 3 or 4 hours. If you're feeling ambitious, give it a try! The results are fantastic.

I'm not a reinvent-the-wheel kind of girl so we pieced together ideas we found elsewhere and made them work for us.

The first thing we did was follow the beginning steps of this tutorial at Purl Bee.

All of the sewing can be done by hand. So if you're intimidated by or don't own a sewing machine, don't let it stop you!

When we got to this point, we detoured and tossed the Purl Bee instructions. They are great instructions, they just weren't going to work for us. {See that unfinished huge tie end? We cut that off in the end}

Even reducing the pattern left us with a tie too large for a toddler, and I wasn't crazy about my son wearing a chocking hazard for the entire evening. It just made me nervous.

So to finish off the tie, we made it a permanent knot and took some steps from Kojo Design's infant tie tutorial in order to use Velcro to attach the neckband. To accomplish this, I actually made my husband tie it around his neck and then slip it ever so carefully over his head. It was tricky, but it worked.

Then we hand stitched the knot closed, making sure no raw edges could be seen from the front. Then we cut off the extra "tail."

We used a machine to finish off the Velcro pieces, but it could easily be hand sewn as well.

{The only advice I would add is that you consider the width of the neckband. We double-checked our length measurement, but did not take into account that an infant dress shirt has a narrower collar. To make it work, I had to fold the neckband in half width-wise so it would fit nicely underneath his collar.}

1 $7 yard of fabric and a few hours later...the results were fantastic!

Linking to:

Sumo's Sweet Stuff

Creative Itch