I straight-stitched the stripes on and then sewed front to back and stuffed kitty. Not exactly the result I’d planned, but I’m making progress matching the result to the intent.
The eyes are much lighter in this picture only partly because they light was different; in the first picture, the fabric and floss were still wet from being rinsed.
This is the face for a felt + embroidery stuffed toy. My next thing is adding stripes, sewing the back, and stuffing.
This is from a simple design I sketched (and then, oddly, ended up reversing horizontally when I freehanded the silhouette onto the felt).
I had some trouble with the thing I meant to finish today, and this piece is a bit of experimentation to get a better handle on the fabric. Also an attempt at embroidered features. Baby steps!
Continuation of Thing 16:
Learning a different stitch (split stitch). I made a nest out of herringbone stitches, but it ended up looking just plain awful!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has tutorials on just the kinds of things I like to make. This time it’s the cat quilt. My cat’s never seen a fish, and for some reason I thought sewing a circle would be hard after my lumpy catnip-toy experience, so I decided to be clever and do a children’s book cover. I suspect my cat at least saw a mouse when he was living under a porch before I took him home, so I chose Frederick, the art for which lends itself very well to the appliqué technique used in the EMSL project. (I used the catnip-toy fabric for the back.)
It wasn’t until I was actually sitting down at the sewing machine that I realized I’d set myself up for a crash course in sewing on a curve. I think I did OK, although I’m starting to see why quilters like having fancy anti-pucker features in their machines. And if my cat could just pull himself away from the cat chaise, we might see what he thinks of his new quilt.
When I made my tiny photo book (Thing 10: Tiny Photo Book), I was using a folding pattern intended to, with several folds and a single cut, yield a tiny book with a front, back, and 3 spreads.
I ended up making a lot more cuts to get more spreads and thus needing to “bind” my book, which I did with jewelry wire and beads. With less cutting than I originally used but 1 cut more than the single-sided version calls for, the book still doesn’t need to have a spine or stitching and can have 4 spreads. I used the following pattern (in which you would fold on the dotted lines and cut on the solid lines):
My goal was to do all the printing on a single sheet of paper, and then fold and cut to get a tiny book that needed no binding. (I did glue the blank [backs of the] pages.) And I got this:
There. Now I can move on to accordion books and stab-stitch books.
Thing 10 is a teeny tiny photo book. It has a front, a back, and 7 spreads. You can see the photos I used for it at Flickr. All the pages come from a single sheet of 8.5-x-11 paper. It is bound with flexible wire and beads.
And here it is, the final piece of Mr Bun’s new furniture:
This tasseled cushion (velvet, metallic fabric for edging, batting, silvery tassels, pewter button) is the final piece of my modification of the Cat Chaise. The cushion is tied to the frame of the chaise with silvery ribbon (hidden from prying claws).
How does he feel about it?
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has loads of fabulous tutorials, including one for a cardboard chaise longue suitable for cats [ www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/catchaise ]. I modified it in preparation for a cushion (to be made tomorrow), and because I didn’t feel like cutting out little feet. Also, I just wanted to cut the cardboard freehand instead of bothering with a template or pattern. This project was a great excuse to get a glue gun! I foresee more appearances of that device in future things-a-day this month.
Mr Bun seemed traumatized by the unnecessary destruction of a cardboard box, but I predict he will have napped on it within 12 hours.
So far so good on www.thing-a-day.com this year. Mr Bun is not thrilled about my new sewing machine, so today’s thing is for him.
This particular thing is made of silly Valentine’s Day fabric from the remnants bin (I know, hard to believe!), stuffed with batting with a fragrant catnip center. I felt a bit bad about my sloppy hemming – I have a lot to learn about sewing (machine and manual) on a curve. Did he like it anyway?
Oh yeah.