Well, with surprisingly little angst or time, the sling is made.  At this point I think I've made about 20 of them, so I've got it down pretty well, and when I use linen (2.5 yards cut all the way up the middle gets me two slings, and each long piece of fabric has one good selvedge that doesn't need hemming) it goes particularly quickly.  I love linen. One barely has to iron, just make a fold and dampen it a little, and there's your crease. :-) (I'm such a lazy-ass.) I think I finished this one top to bottom in about 30 minutes.  Don't tell the woman I'm giving it to; I naturally want her to think I slaved for hours.:-)

So now my friend Katie will have a lovely red linen sling with silver aluminum rings (from slingrings.com/ --the definitive source for sling rings, although I really liked my heavy steel rings that I got from...somewhere. I forget where.).  It has a simple fanned shoulder (no pleats; I didn't have the patience, and I like the fanned ones myself)

For anyone who sews even a little, baby slings are a GREAT thing to learn to make for baby gifts or for one's own use...I used mine until literally last summer, when my daughter was 3.  We had a mei tai we'd use for hikes, and I always kept a ring sling in the car in case she fell asleep in the carseat when I needed to go shopping and couldn't manage to carry her in my arms.  Once one gets past the learning curve, these things are AMAZING.

For the record, pretty much everything I know about sewing slings I learned from the lovely Reverend Jan (of sleepingbaby.net  or her baby crafts site www.sleepingbaby.net/jan/Baby/index.html) --either from her directions there or something she linked to.   She's also here on LJ, at jan_andrea ...) 

Jan, by the way, is the one who also clued me in to not hemming the selvedge side--not out of laziness (at least, not totally!) but because then, after the sling is made and you're wearing it, it's REAL easy to tell which "rail" you need to adjust when something's too loose or too tight.

So...we have baby gifts.  Good to go.

And I'm sorta psyched...I wrote a new piece for our contemporary choir, for Easter, and we rehearsed it tonight, and it...okay, I'll just say it Doesn't Suck and leave it at that.  If I can get an accompaniment written out, it might be publishable.  I write enough crap that I'm sort of able to tell when I've done something non-crappy. We'll see.

Time to go home!
 

--J