The joys of babies learning to feed themselves! Landon was fine with us feeding him mush until he was old enough that the messes he made from self feeding were minimal. We just wiped up the one or two pieces of food that fell on the floor. Riley is another story. He will hardly let us feed him. So he is on a full finger food diet. The down side is that a 9 month old on a finger food diet means that 95% of the food ends up on the floor (4% is on him). I didn’t want to spend $50 on something that was just going to get food dropped on it (ok, maybe it wasn’t $50…). They have the summer stuff on clearance right now at Target (sad that summer is just starting…) and so I grabbed me up a table cloth – the kind that has the felt like backing on it. Now I know it’s probably not machine washable, but it would probably tolerate a hosing off in the back yard, plus I can pick it up and dump all the food into the trash or sink rather than be on the floor on my hands and knees scrubbing.
I picked up the largest one they had, because I really didn’t know how big I wanted it to be and since they were all the same price…Once I got it home I tried to remember the typical radius of food carnage on the floor and cut the table cloth to roughly that size.
Now I know that it’s plastic and the backing is like spray on adhesive fuzz, and so it didn’t really NEED sewing, but for the sake of not having the cut edge showing I decided to fold it over and sew it.
I ended up folding mine in half, so I got two splat mats. The table cloth was only 3.50, so I think that even if they only last a few weeks, it’s a pretty good deal.
So really the tutorial in it’s most basic form is buy a cheep “felt” backed table cloth, cut it to the size you want and put it under the high chair to catch the spills. Sewing is definitely optional.