What To Do With Old Baby Clothes

What to do with those old baby clothes:

So my second baby is getting a bit bigger now and I’m looking at the piles and piles of clothes I’ve collected. Some of them I’m more attached to than others. Obviously I have some lovely keepsakes and quilts made from my favourites but the conundrum is what to do with all the rest of those boxes of baby clothes! If you’re a keen seamstress in the making then the possibilities for making new clothes (even Ipod holders – anyone?) there are lots of internet guides on upcycling your old clothes, but what if you’re not so keen to go the new wardrobe-DIY route? Here are 10 ideas of what to do with your children’s old baby clothes that don’t require too much effort:

1. Take them to the charity shop – if they’re not good enough quality to be worn again you can still donate them as ‘rags’ and the charity will still make money from them.
2. Come to us and a whole zoo full of beautiful keepsake animals, cover every bed you own in a keepsake quilt or blanket and cover your walls in our Forget Me Not Frames ????
3. Put them on Freecycle.
4. Sell bundles of them on ebay or on a parenting forum like netmums or mumsnet, where you can do it locally so people can collect rather than having to package everything up and post it.
5. Give them to friends and/or family.
6. Have another baby ????
7. Sell them by the kilo to places like clothesbank.co.uk (they’ll even come and pick them up) in return for immediate cash.
8. Can’t be bothered with all the hard work of photographing and selling them but still want to make some money? Try sellyourbabyclothes.co.uk. You post them the stuff and they do the online auction for you and take a cut of the price.
9. Let us turn them in to a special, special animal, blanket, quilt, picture frame (all of the above). Ok, so technically it is the same as point number two but I think it’s such a good idea it’s worth mentioning twice!
10. Organise a clothesaid.co.uk collection for your childrens’ school. Get parents to donate a bag full of clothes each and the school will get £600 for every tonne of clothing they collect. A tonne is about 200 bags. Clothes Aid will even send you posters to advertise the collection, bags to put the clothes in a thank you certificate once you’re finished.

Lots of people out there really want a teddy made from their child’s favourite old baby clothes and we’re more than happy to help (though we do stress that these are keepsakes, not teddies made for playing with).

So, lot’s of ideas, not all of which are totally fanciful. Whatever you do with them enjoy doing it. I don’t class myself as being particularly sentimental but I was still amazed at how hard it was to actually let go of some of those most well-worn, well-treasured items. This dragon is my fave now – made from my son’s old shirts. We were living in Cyprus at the time and he wore these to pieces (cooler than t shirts). Too stained to be passed on, even to younger siblings, they had to go and its nice to see them somewhere other than the bin!