Sewing

Mate­ri­als Needed:
Fab­ric (i used a woven cot­ton),
nurs­ing pads (or cot­ton knit , fleece, bamboo/cotton velour, or any fab­ric for padding), elastic

Aaliya started crawl­ing 2 weeks ago(8 months old) and I was wor­ried that the tiles on the floor would be a bit hard for her to crawl on. It is still really hot here so she isn’t wear­ing pants all that often. I looked online for a tuto­r­ial to make some crawl­ing knee pads but I couldn’t find any.… so I attempted it myself.

Please remem­ber that i’m still new at sewing so this may not be the ‘right’ way to do it… but it is the way that i did it.

First , I decided to use some old nurs­ing pads to use as the padding part (you can eas­ily sub­sti­tute this for 2–3 lay­ers of another fab­ric like knit, bamboo/cotton velour, any­thing that will give padding. Just cut them in desired cir­cle size and sew the lay­ers together)

I mea­sured my nurs­ing pads and then cre­ated a cir­cle pic­ture in pho­to­shop elements..(i made the cir­cle 4 by 4″.) I cut that out then cut 4 lay­ers of my printed fabric.

I mea­sured around Aaliya’s thigh area and knees and sub­tracted an inch for the elastic.

I cut my elas­tic at 6.5 inches and 5 inches.
I used Fold Over Elas­tic because it was pretty and soft but if I had to make these again I would use nor­mal elas­tic since it wouldn’t be as slip­pery on pants.

The fold over elas­tic doesn’t stitck to the pants since it is so soft so the knee pads move around a lit­tle. This would def­i­nitely be reme­died by using nor­mal elas­tic which has a tighter hold.
Place two fab­ric cir­cles right sides together and insert the elas­tic leav­ing a lit­tle on the edge as shown in the pictures.

Sew around using a 1/4 inch seam allowance and leave enough place for turn­ing AND for stuff­ing the padding in. (Don’t for­get to remove pins while sewing). I stitch a few times(backstitching) over all elas­tic area to rein­force the elastic.

Trim the excess… (make sure not to cut through any stitching)

Turn over and stuff padding inside, you should be left with some­thing that looks sim­i­lar to this…(but obvi­ously pret­tier since u prob­a­bly have more sewing expe­ri­ence than me hehe)

Tuck in the edges of the area u left open and top­stitch around the whole thing. (Make sure to use the same color thread for this part so that it looks neat)

I then did a heart applique on a blank shirt… It was my first time using the satin stitch and sec­ond time doing applique.. its fun! I made a match­ing fab­ric flower too.

And she’s off!

(yep… I can see that…
NOTE: Do Not Use Fold Over Elas­tic… use REGULAR elas­tic.
Reason:the knee pads will roll up as in the pic above.. next time I will make sure to use nor­mal elastic)

I know that kids don’t have knee caps yet but it is a light layer of padding and I do think its a lit­tle more com­fort­able for them. Sort of like crawl­ing on carpet.

I hope you found this use­ful If you know of any other way I’d love to hear it since I think these are pretty cute and unique. I would love to try it again.

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