Three Very Different Owl Cards

As I have mentioned before a lot of people I know love owls and I am always on the look out for owl designs. I like to use different styles in my cards to reflect the recipient. Last year I made three very different owl cards.

The first was a lovely blackwork owl, I love the simple effectiveness of blackwork. It was a really easy design to follow. I used this kit from x-calibre designs. It only has 3 basic fill designs which prevents it from being overcrowded and fussy. The shape is lovely and makes the design quite cute. I would highly recommend this design for a beginner. I backed it on card with no other embellishments as I felt this allowed the design to be shown off.

X-calibre Designs Blackwork Owl

The second card design came as part of the free gift with The World of Cross Stitch magazine issue 216. There was a small booklet of 'luxury designs' and two medeira threads. The design was really clever as it used different thread thickness to create the shading. At first glance you assume that they use 4 threads as opposed to one strand and two strands of the two colours they give you. They also use stitch free areas well to include white in the design. I chose to sew on evenweave as I feel it gives a better finish. Once again I kept things simple when making the card up and just used an aperture card. It is a lovely design although it did take quite a bit of stitching as there is a lot of solid colour. They are all full stitches with no fractional stitches and the backstitch is only used for the tummy. The simplicity of the design and pattern combined with few colour changes make it another pattern that would be good for somebody starting out.

The World of Cross Stitch - Issue 216  - Pink and Turquoise Owl

My third owl card was made with felt and I found the pattern on a great site full of ideas and felt birds. This design was incredibly simple and took even less work than my Felt Triceretops. The feathers are only attached at the tops which gives good texture and doesn't take a lot of sewing. I opted for button eyes and I felt the shine on the buttons was nice as it made me think of seeing the flash of an owls eyes at night. The tutorial is really helpful and the pattern pieces are all there to download. The feathers were attached with a simple slip stitch in the co-ordinating colour, the face was blanket stitched on and the beak was backstitched in brown thread. I wanted it to be quite bold and used the burgundy to lift the grey and brown. I loved the co-ordination with the burgundy aperture card. 

Felt Owl using Downeast Thunder Farm Pattern

Sock Owls

My little sister, her best friend and my niece all love owls, they all love socks and they all have birthdays in October. My sister had shared a link to this site on Facebook so I could not resist trying it. A friend had made me a sock monkey in the past which is amazing so it was something I was tempted to have a go at and was inspired by the variety of creations.

I stocked up on nice thick socks intending to make a few different animals for a lot of different recipients. The tutorial is really well put together with a lot of photos and step by step instructions. In fact it is so well laid out that it makes them look simple, although they felt far from simple when putting them together. There is a lot of judgement in the shaping and placing of features, and there is no way of making a standard pattern as each sock will be a slightly different shape and/or size so it is logical that you translate the shapes onto your own sock. The other thing I found out is that "sock fabric" has a mind of its own. It stretches where it wants to stretch; if you use thick socks, as I did, the weave on the inside makes it hard to get the machine foot over without it snagging. Some of my owls had stripes so I used a lot of pins to match the stripes at the seam.

One of the nicest features of the design is the small weighted bag inside, made out of the end of the plain sock. This allowed the owls to "sit up" and not fall over. After a couple of attempts I got the eyebrow/ears in. At first I was too hesitant to use a  big section of the head fabric to make the ears, but I would say the main thing with this tutorial is to get stuck in and just be confident following the design. I found the wings easy to do and attach as long as the pattern was well matched on the seam. The eyes were also easy to attach but the beak was very very tricky. I used some orange t shirt fabric as I could not find any orange socks (I have since found lots of orange socks!). It took a lot of fiddling to get one side on and then a lot of stuffing and tucking to get the other side on. As the picture shows some of the beaks are more central than others, though I think this just adds to the personality! I love the way that the expressions develop while you are occupied with actually getting the beak on. You look up and all of a sudden they are done!

I was pleased with the result and everybody seemed pleased/amused by it. I would recommend the tutorial and it was good fun to make. I got quicker as I went through all three and even the beaks got easier. It is definitely correctly tagged as an "Intermediate tutorial" but worth the perseverance in the end.

My little sock owls - Craft Passion design.

Skipping Skirt

For my birthday a friend bought me Simple Sewing with Lola Nova by Alexandra Smith. It is great book full of lovely ideas and different techniques. It give comprehensive guides on how to go about things and the skills needed. This allows the project pages to focus on the instructions without getting too bogged down by the technique. the book mostly contains projects for around the house and children's clothes. The book itself is pretty and contains an inspiring array of fabrics. I was instantly drawn to the skipping skirt, I think this was partly as I was looking for something to make for an 8 year olds birthday and because at that age I would have loved one.

The skirt itself was really easy to make, I cut the pattern according to instructions and the set about finding the fabric. It is an amazing "stash busting" project as it uses quite a small amount of fabric for each panel. Choosing the fabric was a lot of fun and I took quite a bit of time to play with different combinations. I was eager to include different fabric types as well to give it more texture. I started with a very pretty woodland critters panel and a complimentary leaf pattern, this  fabric was used for an apron. I then added in the buildings as the colours matched and I liked the urban/rural contrast. The small square fabric picked out key colours without being overpowering. I decided to pick out one of the colours and use that to tie all the fabrics together. I had some fantastic orange shot with different shades so it matched the fox. My last two fabrics were a dark dusky pink cord and a chino fabric. I love using cord as it gives a texture and the colours change as the light catches it, although I was careful to not put the heavy fabric together so it sat right. It was very forgiving to sew as the most exposed seam is in the waist band, which is not very exposed at all.

The one thing that is does show up, however, is fabric cutting. I took quite a bit of time on this as any pattern with a vertical line would be obvious if cut incorrectly. I also tried hard to minimise the number of animals that I cut in half! This is always a struggle with character fabric. On the plus side I managed to avoid any blatant decapitation.

Pretty Skipping Skirt from a Lola Nova design.

I finished it off with some pretty pink bias binding. I think the bias binding gives a neater finish and again it ties all of the panels together. It is a great gift as all you need is a waist measurement which is easy to get.

I was pleased with the end result and it seemed to go down well, she looked lovely in it and it flared out when she twirled. I am planning another two - I just need to decide on exact fabric combinations.

UPDATE - Skirt number two in turquoise and purple. Again I felt it was important to mix colour, pattern and texture. This one was made even quicker after the experience of the first.

Skipping Skirt made using pattern from Lola Nova Designs.

I will be making other things from the book and keeping a close eye on her blog.

A Taggy Owl for a Little Lady

Finally a friend had a baby girl!

I have been loving making taggy owls and dinosaurs for little boys but I was delighted to hear that a friend had an adorable little girl. This gave me the perfect excuse to dig about in my stash of pink and purple fabrics.

Now - I know some people are groaning at me reaching for the pink! I have lots of female friends who dislike pink and wont wear it. I agree it is a stereotype to assume that a girl would like pink. My little girl is now 2 and loves her sparkly shoes and Thomas the Tank Engine in equal measure so I don't stick to gender specific toys. She is now expressing lots of opinions on what she likes and what she does not and we encourage that. As a baby however she liked colour and lots of it. I also found that if I dressed her in neutral colours or lots of blue it led to that awkward conversations where you realise the person you are talking to can't tell or remember if you had a boy or a girl. So with great excitement I drew up a pattern and made a pink and purple owl - if only so my friend doesn't have to smile politely and say "She" a lot.

I made it in the same way as my first two. I had cut up the previous patterns so drew another. This means the shape is a little different but I love that there are no two the same. I used cord and velvet and selected lots of fun ribbon again. The main difference is this owl has her eyes open. It occurred to me that this would give a good area of light and dark contrast which babies love and I was pleased with the result.

Girly Taggy Owl

Pretty Cord Fabric On The Back

Stitching for Babies

I love stitching for babies. It is just so exciting and you can use lovely colour combinations. My first real project on my sewing machine was backing a cross stitched Afghan blanket. I do admit I love stitching full stop but you can find such lovely ideas and patterns for babies and I loved it when I had hand made gifts for my little girl. They all got tucked away in a memory box after use. For her birthday this year my daughter got the most beautifully quilted height chart and I am just in awe of it.

The neighbours of my Mum and Sister have just had a little boy and I was asked to make a couple of designs that I have made before for the new arrival. I would love to say this was a "commission" but in reality because it was for family it was more of a request with a charity donation as payment. My little sister loves owls so I wanted to pass that on to the recipient and they have cats. I chose two lovely embroidery designs of owls and pussycats (but sadly no pea-green boat!). I used sublime stitching designs. They are iron on transfer designs which saves the hastle of tracing and gives clear lines to follow. I love the designs as they tend to be different, modern and simple. The outlines allow you to do a simple backstitch to just use the shape or fill it in if you decide to.

As good as some complex iron on patterns look all of the detail prevents you from just stitching outlines. I decided to do a simple outline of the two owls but using variegated thread. I find the variegated thread give a simple and effective result. The owl design makes me smile because the parent owl is looking half awake checking on the owl chick. I did however come across another interpretation from a friend who thought it looked like the parent owl was winking in a sinister way as if thinking about pushing the chick off! As disturbed as I was by this theory it was a kind reminder that everybody looks at things differently. I will let readers make up their own mind and keep my fingers crossed that my sister's friends see it my way!

I think one of the great things about this design is that I have stitched it three times and each one is different. The first was raising money for charity so was bright and unisex to appeal to as may people as possible, the second was for a friend so was bright and bold and used her favourite colours. The last one has a more subtle colour palate, as that is what was requested, but it is still colourful with the orange and blue. I adore the cat design with the kitten following, again it was very easy to personalise as you can just alter the ribbon colour. I felt that adding a fur effect would have been overkill. One of the things to keep in mind is that the back of the bib is on display so you need to make sure you have a really neat back with no lose threads, loops or anything that little fingers can get into! I am normally very neat with my backs anyway but if in any doubt with a bib I just put some whip stitches round.

The other item I made was a "taggy owl". I noticed when shopping for toys that there lots of comfort blanket type toys about. I then found a couple of examples online that I really liked so I decided to make my own. I made my pattern from scratch using greaseproof paper. With things like this I tend to design on a folded piece of paper and cut my fabric on the fold so it is closer to being symmetrical. I made one for a friend's little boy at Christmas but used different fabric so they are different and  unique. It was great fun choosing fabric and ribbon mixing lots of textures and extra bursts of colour. I made sure my ribbon was folded so that you can rub the sides together and added details to the tummy. The tummy ribbon has textured squares to make it soft and give the effect of feathers.

I added all of the detail to the front and then layered it so it was inside out and sewed a seam around making sure the wings and ribbon were in place. I turned it through a small turning gap and sewed the gap after. It is really straight forward but fun to make.

My first taggy owl

The new taggy owl