Ain't nobody got time to do a bunch of research on the history of babywearing, but I'm sure it goes something like this: Rural village of poor country with lots of women working in fields and long walks with small children requiring women to wear them, usually in woven wraps. Modern women of those same countries now look down on the woven wraps because it's how poor women carry their children, and they want to be western and use fancy strollers. Now here in the western civilization we have crazy granola-wanna be women like myself who drop serious cash for a woven wrap and choose that over our modern Mercedes of a stroller. I like to pair my wraps with preppy J. Crew outfits. That's obnoxious.
Babywearing, specifically with woven wraps has become a crazy thing, and I only know the basics. Woven wraps are great because they can carry babies and toddlers, unlike the moby, or other stretchy wraps, which maxes out around 16 pounds because of the stretchy material. Woven wraps are either hand or machine woven. And if you can get your hands on a handwoven... holy unicorn batman. Many of the woven buying and trading happens on Facebook and Etsy, however Etsy listings are really only known through FB. Confusing I know. I spent the last few weeks scouring the pages of babywearing swap to find my next woven, hopefully a handwoven, and hopefully less than $400- seriously. I found one. A used Warped and Wonderful handwoven, oh my god it's mine, it's coming to my house, I can't wait to touch it. When wraps get delivered, people call it fluff mail. I told you we were all insane.
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| my Warped and Wonderful handwoven fluff mail! |
That's one way of hoping to get a wrap.
Sometimes they go up for a draw. You sign up and enter to win the RIGHTS to purchase. Yes, that's crazy. If you win by random stoke of stupid luck, then you can pay them $800+ for the handwoven of your dreams. You read that correctly, woven wraps can go for over $1000...Like people live in trailer homes and eat Ramen noodles so they can have this woven. Fine, whatever, but I still haven't been lucky enough to win the damn rights to buy anything. UppyMama handwovens are gorge, like colorful pieces of magic woven together. I always enter their draws in hopes of one day someone will congratulate me and give me 24 hours to divorce my husband so I can give them a bunch of money for their woven, because let's be real, I cannot spend that much money and still be married. (love you boo!) The handwoven I purchased was from another mama's "for sale" listing, hopefully there's no cigarette holes or barf stains on it- she said there wasn't.
Also what fabric blend are you interested in? Oh man, there are soooo many blends you can get! Obviously the most common is 100% cotton, but then there's wool blends, cashmere blends, mercerized cotton- who the hell knows what that is, hemp blends, bamboo, unicorn tail blends, so on so forth. I may or may not have a second wrap coming that's a wool blend, because- Chicago winter.
**If the husband is reading, I absolutely do not have a second wrap coming.
You can even buy wraps as "dye blanks" that are white or cream, a neutral color and send them off to professionals to dye it in your own custom way. holy jesusmausadkajsfa. What this is all telling me is that I should buy a weaving loom and start my own damn business- "Fatty Tuna Wovens" Boom.
Learning to wrap with these wovens is almost another blog post in itself, but I'm rolling it into this novel. I started off with the Moby wrap and there's like one way to wrap the baby, which is fine for newborns and beginners. With a woven there are almost an infinite number of carries you can do and the crazy cult people all abbreviate, FWCC, CCCB, TUB... I can't even think of more than that because I'm basically brain dead from all this nonsense. The best thing about woven's is the ability to wrap a baby on your back, you can't do this with a stretchy wrap for safety purposes. But there are multiple ways to wrap, and it depends on the length of the wrap too, if you have a long size or if you get down with a shorty. Ugh. I can't even.
I'm new to the wrapping world, especially the world of wearing Avi on my back. I sweat, cry, sometimes vomit, but sometimes we are successful and then spend the day taking selfies of our successful back carry. No joke. I'm a loser. Some people are awesome enough to actually do this in public. I would for sure drop Avi on the cement and someone would call CPS on me. That's Child protective services, not Chicago public schools... although maybe same thing?
Well I'm off onto a new adventure of seeing all the new fall wraps come alive on my facebook stream. Maybe someday I will be a lucky winner of a draw. Until then, me and my three wraps will continue playing and practicing until I master a FWCC or CCCB.. whatevs.
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| My new Didymos wooly arrived in time for this blog! The picture doesn't capture the hot pink and red gorgeous color with Indian elephant print. LOVE. |
Happy babywearing!
