DIY "Fancy" Baby Boy Bibs

I made these bibs for our neighbors who just had twins... yes, TWINS. They had two babies at one time. Most likely they will be able to use some extra bibs.

Let me preface this post by saying that 1) Never again will I attempt a DIY without doing previous research! it was just a bad idea, and because I didn't research 2) My examples are bad! They're just not 100% helpful. But you can at least learn from my mistakes!... just be prepared to take my process with a grain of salt because at a couple different points, things got a little rocky. You'll see what I mean. Maybe plan on reading through the whole post before starting on your own bibs.

Lucky for me, I don't claim to be very good at anything. I'm a self-proclaimed level 1.5 beginner! So, if you're not a beginner as well, you may get annoyed with my ramblings pretty quickly (sorry about that).But with all that said, I still think the bibs turned out pretty darn cute and that this post is worth something! So let's get to it!


I knew I wanted the bibs to be "fancy" because isn't that the cutest thing on little baby boys?! I think so. Onesies will have vests and bowties all over them, but I've never seen bibs like this so I wanted to try my hand at making them.

The first thing I did was try to make a pattern to use for both bibs.
NOTE: I made the neck strap too skinny!!! (You'll see why later) DO NOT do what I did!!

I had a piece of cardboard that I also used to cut out a triangle pattern for a quilt I'm making for my own baby boy (more on that coming soon!) so that's why there's a big chunk missing out of my bib pattern.
For lack of a better example, this is what I came up with. I traced the pattern on to the two fabrics I wanted to use for the front of the bibs and cut them out.
If I was to do it again, I would do either a much fatter neck strap or just leave the straps off altogether and plan on adding them back in later (you'll see what I ended up doing to fix the problem below).


I then used the same pattern to trace and cut out my backing for the bibs- a nice thick, soft, towel-like fabric.
I also cut out a tiny little vest and suspenders to be added on to the bibs as well :)

NOTE: I didn't realize it yet, but the gray "vest" had to be significantly smaller in order to allow for the side seams on the bib. I had to end up trimming a lot off the edges.


Here's how I made the little bowtie (The same process I used to make a bowtie for Ben over in "DIY Bowtie for the classy man in your life")

1. start with a rectangular piece of fabric and fold the long edges toward the middle. then take the short edges and fold them in toward the middle as well.

2. Sew this by hand into place, making a rectangular shape that will become the bowtie. 

3. Then take a separate, small strip of fabric to be used for the center of the bowtie, fold it's long edges in toward the center like you did above, and wrap that piece around the rectangle you just sewed. 

3. Again, hand sew that middle piece into place and it's as easy as that... you have a tiny, cute little bowtie!

At this point, I had to finish the front of each of the bibs before adding the backing. Here's how I did the suspender and bowtie bib.

The first thing was to glue down the fabric strips I cut out to be used as "suspenders." I found (through trial and error) that glueing them down first is very important! otherwise your edges may fray and your stitches may not stay in place. 

After glueing, I sewed around all the edges with a zig zag stitch on my sewing machine.

The trick was to keep the edge of the gray fabric right in the middle of the machine's presser foot so that the zig zag landed on both the gray fabric and the blue fabric. 

Next, I simply hand-sewed the bowtie on making sure to tack down each of the corners. 

Now that the front of the bib is all all put together, it's time to add the backing! 

To do so, flip the bib backward against the backing fabric, pin the edges down and sew along the edges making sure to leave a couple inches at the bottom unsewn so that you are able to flip it right-side-out.

Ok... here it is turned inside out. BUT I couldn't get my neck straps through because they were too skinny! So, for the next bib, I went ahead and cut the straps off before sewing around the edges. 

This picture shows the suspender bib with the straps stuck inside :( laying on top of the vest bib with the straps cut off :) so you can see how/where I cut them.

Lastly, I used fabric glue to close up the hole that wasn't sewed together. 

Because my straps didn't turn out, I had to improvise, make some "ribbons" and sew them on as straps. After ironing, here are the finished products!