General Construction Safety Tips

Fabric Choices

Structured carriers call for very strong fabric - not only does it have to bear weight, it also has to bear weight along several seams. Recommended fabrics are 7oz linen, cotton duck, heavy twills and other bottomweight fabrics, denim, and upholstery fabrics. While fabrics like gauze, osnaburg, and lightweight linen are popular for wraps, the can (arguably) be too light for a structured carrier. Some people will make most of the carrier out of osnaburg or 5oz linen, but will still anchor the straps to a body panel of heavy duck or twill.

NO weight bearing piece of your carrier should be made from anything with ANY stretch or a thin fabric like muslin, quilter’s cotton, or lightweight apparel fabric. That includes wrap straps! Knits are tempting for wrap straps on a MT, but are EXTREMELY difficult to seam safely, sag under weight, and should NOT be used. Leave the knits to a three-pass stretchy wrap.

Thread Choice

If all you are doing is sewing hems (the folded edges of the fabric) you can use just about any thread you like, and any stitch type. Most people do a standard straight stitch, but some people choose to use a decorative stitch or zigzag along one rail of a wrap in order to tell the two rails apart. Polyester thread will be stronger and less likely to break under tension, but keep in mind that if you dye your wrap later, polyester thread will not take the dye. Cotton thread will dye, but if your fabric has any "give" to it, it might snap under the tension of simply tightening the wrap.

For anything structural, including the x-boxes used to secure straps to a body panel or the three lines of reinforcement stitches on a ring sling, you will want 100% polyester all-purpose thread. Avoid heavy-duty threads unless you have a lot of experience working with them - they tend to jam up home sewing machines pretty bad and the extra thickness is not necessary if your carrier is properly reinforced. Gutterman is the gold standard for high quality, but any brand is fine.

Wrap Conversions

You can safely make a structured carrier out of a purpose-woven wrap. It is recommended to serge/overcast stitch the edges to keep them from unraveling before assembling your carrier. Since you will either need to sew through both layers (leaving visible x-boxes) or have a third hidden layer (which would waste wrap you can’t see) most people choose to hide their x-boxes on a hidden layer inside of something cheap and boring, like twill or heavyweight linen. (More on x-boxes later.)

Basic Rules of Construction

Most structured carriers have two main elements: straps and a body panel. While those vary in style (a mei tai might have long wrap straps, where a buck carrier would have short padded straps with webbing and buckles, and the bottom of an onbu would have vary short straps sewn into loops or around rings) what they have in common is that these straps MUST be well anchored to the body panel.

The general rule is to have enough extra strap to overlap it with your main body panel piece by at least 5” and then attach it with an x box (literally a rectangle with an X going from corner to corner) and go over the x box with 2 or 3 lines of stitching. Use an all-purpose 100% polyester thread for strength.

How Many Body Panels?

A common question. “Do I need 2 body panels or 3?” The generally accepted answer is that you have two options:

2 body panels, both made of a strong weight-bearing fabric, which you would sew together, turn inside out, and THEN sink your straps inside the holes you left for them and sew your x-boxes through BOTH body panels,

OR 3 body panel pieces (2 weight-bearing, 1 decorative) with the x-boxes only sewn onto a heavy-duty inner (hidden) layer and then turned so the reinforcing stitches are hidden.

Attaching Straps

Anytime two pieces of fabric are joined in a way that will bear weight, such as attaching straps to the body, it is recommended to overlap by several inches (general recommendation is sinking your straps into the body by 5") and sewing a reinforcing x-box to attach the two - literally a rectangle with lines connecting all the corners diagonally as well, so there are multiple lines of stitching reinforcing in multiple directions.