glam chinstraps for the spups

since sarah has taken to calling me hdog (like most other folks of my pre-dc life), i call her spups. pups, because she's pint-sized. hehe. sarah has sleep apnea and needs super strong chinstraps to clamp her mouth shut when she uses her bipap machine at night. sure she has muscular dystrophy, but this girl's jaw muscles are robust (as evidenced by our call logs)! her straps previously had stretchy velcro, which just weren't strong enough. no worries, i can fix that.

during my visit to boston (pics will be in the next post!), i hit up winmill fabrics in chinatown. wasn't the greatest, but they did have $1 patterns! (yes, i do visit a lot of fabric stores during my travels. it's embarassing, and i admit that i do have a problem.) i got 4 yards of nonstretchy sew-on velcro for 90c/yd. (relatively pricey i thought, but it is crucial to sarah's existence.) i removed the chin cup from the stretchy straps and sewed on the velcro, which i encased in grey jersey (because the backside of the velcro was still rather abrasive) from a brown univ tshirt that sarah outgrew (go bears!). what could be a better way to commemorate our alma mater? then came the fun part... decorating each! i sewed purple satin ribbon straight down the middle of the jersey to hide the seam of the first one. wanting to up the challenge, i ruffled some white satin ribbon and sewed it down the middle of the 2nd. (not an easy task to sew down wily ruffles) for the last one, i went all out and cut strips from the jersey and made box pleats! naturally, the box pleats are my fav, seeing as they were the most complex to make! here i demonstrate how cute one would look with a box pleats chin strap! (please ignore my unruly hair...) because sarah's other complaint of her old straps was that they would slide off her head in the middle of the night, i sewed strips of clear rubbery bra straps onto the inside of the top of each strap to help provide some more friction. sweet dreams, spups!