Sewing Shaggy Elephants!!

One of Becca's good friends is moving to Guam this summer! No one is very happy about the prospects but Erynn's Dad is in the Air Force and Guam is the next stop for the family. Erynn is having a Birthday party today and as we were a bit stumped for a memorable gift, Becca and I decided to get a bit more creative than usual and stitched up a Shaggy pillow of one of Erynn's favorite animals. i had just come across a wonderful book in the library that I thought might appeal to Becca and her love of animals and her desire to find a hobby. The book is called Raggedy Reverse Applique by Kim Deneault. This is a wonderful book with great projects for beginning quilters and stitchers. the Gallery section is full of pictures of wonderful pieces created by Girl Scout Troops and school groups. If anyone is looking for some good start up projects for kids and sewing, this would be a great book to look at.!!

We went thru my stash of fabrics and picked out several bright bold prints that Becca knew would work as they included all of Erynn's favorite colors and we were going for something very whimsical. Then Becca did an Internet search and found some Elephant clipart and we came up with asimple pattern for our pillow. Following the directions in the book we layered our fabric pieces, pinned on our paper pattern and got Becca situated at the sewing machine.

Becca took to the machine and had fabulous speed control right off the mark. She quickly mastered that reverse control and set about stitching over all of our design lines.

(I added the eye's and wrinkle details in a later step.) Once the stitching was done, we removed the paper and cut out the top layer of green fabric within the stitching lines. Then we clipped in to the 1/4 inch margin every 1/4 inch or so.

> For the back, we took the same green spotted background fabric and stitched down colorful strips of fabrics leaving about 1/2 inch edges on both sides of each strip. We clip in to those margins as well about every 1/4 inch. then we stitched front to back with WRONG sides together and then threw the whole thing in the washing machine and drier with a full load of sheets and towels.

Above you can see the Raggedy edges that resulted for the washing and drying. We added a special heart patch to the back so Becca could sign and date our work.

We were both thrilled with the rsults of our efforts and we know that Erynn will love her special gift. She certainly will NOT get anohter gift like this one!!!

Buddy, on the other hand, was a bit miffed with all of the excitement as we appear to have disturbed his beauty sleep!



I am hoping that this successful sewing project will entice Becca to create some more specail projects during her summer break. there has been some talk of working on a specail Owl pillow for herself as a follow on project!! i am trying not to get too excited about the prospects, as 13 year olds don't want to see too much parental enthusiasm. (If you know what I mean!)