Bears that Care for an Expecting Mom

Late last year we received some exciting news from my brother; he and his wife were expecting their third child, and our first nephew on that side of the family! C has already been pregnant twice (with my nieces V and L), and was a consummate trooper with her last pregnancy. So, since by pregnancy #3 it's easy to start thinking of pregnancies as "routine" and "the status quo," I wanted to do something special to commemorate the event. 

Like a handmade maternity top. 

My own experience is that Maternity wear is perfectly calibrated to last *exactly* 1.5 pregnancies. So C, who is usually pragmatic about not spending too much on limited-use things like maternity clothing, could probably use an infusion of nice, new maternity stuff by pregnancy #3. Also, I thought it might be fun to make something in an undeniably boy-ish color since previous maternity wear has, for the most part been used to gestate girls. Enter the perfect fabric.

C is an 80s child like me, and her nickname growing up was "Care Bear." So when I saw this "Bears that Care" print I thought of her, although it wasn't until my brother called that I had an actual justification to BUY some of it. I picked it up from Firefliez Fabrics in Cotton Lycra.

For the pattern I used the Layer Me Up Shirt and the Layer Me Up Maternity Add-on from Patterns 4 Pirates. This was my first P4P project, and I was pretty pleased with the instructions and how simple they were, although putting together the cutting guide/pattern itself was kind of nervewracking. The Layer Me Up Top uses one pattern piece for the torso front and torso back, and then a couple of interchengeable pattern pieces for the armscyes up top, and the Maternity option uses the same back but a different front (obviously), so it was a lot of different pieces to keep track of. It's the same basic concept as a flipbook:

But if you get the pages wrong, you ruin the fabric. Given that my fabric was practically irreplaceable, I spent a fair amount of time asking "do have the correct combo, right?" at every step. That said, the top went together *reasonably* quickly, and I loved the final result.

I paired the main bear print with a delightful yellow solid from Purple Seamstress, which I think gave it just the right amount of POP. From the back it looks like a normal shirt, but in the front there is plenty of room for a baby bump. 

And, speaking of baby bump... here's C with hers! This photo was taken at 22 weeks, just after my creation arrived. C looks amazing, and I'm really flattered that she was excited enough to try it on first thing. 

Looks like in P4P patterns, "tunic length" gets dangerously close to looking like a dress (at least on C, who is 5'3"), but even if this particular tunic/dress combo just gets worn around the house, I'm still glad to see my SIL (and my Nephew!) sporting a little Auntie RLQ love.