His 'n' hers

Two cuddle owls in progress today.

A "his" version:

And a "hers" version:

These take so much polyfill that I ground to a halt with my making yesterday and I had to go out for fresh supplies today.

My boy is totally smitten with his, he said "Mum, you can make anything!".  Well, I do try...

Scraps: all things to all people

I'm softie making this weekend - one made to order for a friend, and one for my little mister because he's been begging me to make him an owl "just like I made for Scarlett".

Mostly I make these kind of things out my stash and scrap bag.  Finding little bits of suitably co-ordinating fabrics and of just the right sizes is part of the fun of making softies this way.  I like the way I have to look at colours and really notice their hues, and decide things like "this blue matches nicely, but this one is the wrong shade altogether."  You stop and realise that sometimes blue is not just blue, and yellow is not just yellow, and so forth.

But the mister saw something entirely different when I brought the scrap bag up onto the back deck for sorting through.  He stopped his scootering to make a closer inspection of play possibilities.

At first he fiddled with winding bits around his feet...

...then he discovered that superhero like wrist ties were really the way to go. 

So far these bits of fabric have also been police handcuffs, a collar for a toy dog, flames of a fire and probably another dozen things I haven't been privy to over the weekend.

Lucky I have a big bag of scraps to suit everybodies purposes!

Slicing

After a lovely breakfast out on Sunday morning the family inevitably ended up in Avid Reader bookshop down in West End.  While my husband did the required reading to the little one in the kids book section (I can no longer get comfortable down on the floor to do that!) I had no other excuse not to wander off to the craft section and see what was new.

I ended up browsing through the new sewing book by Nicole Mallalieu - You Sew Girl!  A host of great projects and lovely photos were between the covers of this lovely book, and also a great section about sewing techniques and equipment.  Call me a nerd but I really like reading about those kind of things in sewing books (not all of them include them though) as I always learn something new or see how I do things the same or different to other sewers.  Nicole was writing about how much she used her rotary cutter to cut out patterns.  This had never occured to me before, I'm a bit scared of the good old rotary cutter, I do all my cutting with scissors.  I do have a cutter though and have used it for limited straight line cutting a few times.  I really thought of it as a quilting tool, not a dressmaking tool.

So this week I tried it out - using plenty of pressure on the cutter and pressing directly down as recommended by Nicole in her book I attempted cutting out the curved shapes of a softie pattern.  And it worked, it worked really well.  An exciting revelation in my sewing room, faster and smoother than using scissors, and only a little bit scary.  Although I have to find a surface to use it that is not down on the floor because as I mentioned already, I've got a problem with the floor at the moment!