adventures in making a mei tai

if craftiness/baby stuff doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip this one 🙂

i love my moby wrap, but it’s stretchy material, so the heavier jace gets the more it pulls on my back. after looking at some mei tai’s online and their ridiculous prices just about everywhere, i decided to make my own.

hodge-podged some instructions that i found online to make one i liked. cost me about $16 in materials and about 5 or 6 hours of my time (but i’m not a very skilled sewer and i have a toddler.. you do the math).

i bought a 60 inch wide piece of 10oz bottomweight fabric, 2 1/3 yards (which is 84 inches). folded hotdog-style, cut it into these pieces –

A is going to be scrap, B is your shoulder straps, C is the body of the wrap, and D is the waist straps.

next, cut the piece i labeled “D” down the fold, so you get these two pieces.

i started with the straps. hem three of the four sides (the two longest and one of the shortest). i used an iron and a few needles to help it lay flat. fold it twice so the raw edge is hidden.

when you hem the straps, make sure to sew as close to the inside of the hem as you can, so that it doesn’t stick out all weird.

for the shoulder straps, one edge is the selvedge part. you can either leave that, or just hem it once since it doesn’t have raw parts. i just folded it once.

the part for the body of the wrap is actually bigger than you need it to be. it should be around 24 inches tall and 19 inches wide. so here i’m measuring where i want to make the hem and marking it with some chalk. ignore the crazy amount of toys jace has in the background.

here’s where i made the chalk marks. i gave myself an inch or two allowance, plus i was too lazy to cut off the excess.

then you just need to pin down these edges all the way around. since these hems will end up on the inside, no need to hide the raws.

i didn’t want my wrap all one color, so i added this strip of fabric. it’s one of those quarters, i think. it was 18 by 21. i just folded it in half hotdog-style and then turned it right side out after i sewed it. put the seam for that in the back, against the wrap, and then pinned the edges on the inside of the body piece. then you can hem the entire body in one sitting. don’t forget to go back over the bottom of the colored piece, if you want a pocket (which is what i was after).

i pleated the raw edges of the straps to get the ready to attach. stupidly, i put the pins on the wrong side of the straps. i wanted the hemmed edges to be hidden when i wore the wrap.

here’s how the pleating looks from the end.

if you go for the pocket idea, don’t forget to watch that material when you hem, or you end up with this.

i guess i got excited to get it done here, because i didn’t take any other pics of making it. next, i sewed the straps onto the backside of the wrap. that’s the part without the colored fabric stuck to it. this is so that the extra sewing to make the straps secure doesn’t show up on the outside of the wrap.

the body of the wrap was designed to fold in half hamburger-style so you don’t have another edge to hem and two pieces to sew together. so the waist straps go right above that fold. i placed mine aiming straight out to the sides.

the top straps i wanted angled so they’d sit on the ends of my shoulders, not up next to my neck. so i had my husband help me measure to make sure they were close to the same angle. it’d be a lot easier if you had a protractor or one of those quilting rulers.

the waist straps i sewed on with a box and an X going through it and went over it four times for strength. the shoulder straps i sewed only with a big triangle (because of the slant, they didn’t leave room for a box) and went over those four times as well.

then you just fold up the body hamburger-style and topstitch the entire thing together.

the moment of truth!

here’s how it looks all put together.

nuts, the pocket sits too low. guess i should have put it up higher. but it’s okay, i still like the splash of color it gives (and it looks like he’s sitting in the colored part).

the pocket seems to work a little better in the front position, and all i was aiming to put in there was a burp rag or something when (if) we have another kid.

carrying a stuffed elephant. he contorted to get it out right after this picture.

so there you go, my one crafty doing for the year.