Meet Rufus, a sodaholic

You know that old joke about kids liking wrapping paper/boxes/bags better than the presents they contain?

Dogs aren’t much better. Ours have more toys that I can count or trip over in the middle of the night. Rope toys, squeaky toys, stuffed animals, nylabones … But what they want most are discarded socks or empty pop bottles.

Glug glug glug

Hey, it’s recycling, right?

Looks like we're not the only ones addicted to soda.

Good to the last drop

Sorry about the lack of crafts tonight. Feeling a bit under the weather and the most entertainment going on around here is watching a big, dumb dog pretend to drink soda. Ha!

Whoo-too: How to owl softie

I would make some changes to this softie the second time around, but this is a really simple, quick, simple softie project that requires only a few items that you probably already have.

1 fat quarter

random scraps of felt

thread

sewing machine or handsewn

Ignore the top - yours won't have the same mistake 🙂

Take your fat quarter and fold in half. This should create fabric that’s 18 X 10.5 inches. Cut a shape similar to a gummy drop with the folded part uncut at the bottom. Pick one side of the folded piece of fabric to be the front of your owl. Cut two wings out of felt and sew onto the edge of the body. Then cut a giant  triangle to serve as a beak, sew on. Then, cut two large white  circles for eyes, and sew so they slightly overlap onto the beak. Sew on two smaller black circles to create the pupils for the eyes. Then, sew two little feather-shaped felt cutouts to the top of the face.

Now that your face and wings are done, fold fabric the other way so that right sides are facing in. Sew around the open edges of your shape (be careful to keep the top feathers sticking out), leaving about 1.5 inches to turn the fabric right side out, then fill with polyfill, sew the remaining hole closed, and you’re done!

The mistake I made in this that I would not make again is choosing to have the hole to flip the owl inside out at the top of his head. This made for an awkward seam. It would have been much better to the hole along the bottom edge. Next time I will do it this way.

For variations, add glasses or even little felt feet.

Handsewn puppet

I absolutely love making cute little projects out of felt. It’s a cheap, quick material to craft with. Total cost for creating this puppet was less than $1.

It’s part of the beginning of a series of admirable career-based toys. Coming up with this pattern, cutting everything out and sewing took a total of 1.5 hours, or about the length of one movie that you 1/2 pay attention to.

The doctor is in

Materials – white, off-white, black, chocolate brown felt. Several colors of embroidery floss.

Matadors

For a former vegetarian, I have one of the strangest collections ever. Ceramic matadors. But that’s another post.

The ridiculously gaudy statues inspired one of my latest softie creations, a stuffed matador and cow. And later, a matching cowboy and cow to go with.

Matador, cows, cowboy

My ridiculous collection of matadors also inspired an early, perfect Valentine’s day gift from my husband – a red ceramic bull. Awesome.

New toy

An area I really need to learn more about for work is the creation and editing of videos. After going over different options for how I can improve in this area, I decided the way I learn best is to dive right in and get hands-on experience.

And so, we ventured to one of my favorite places in the world – Nebraska Furniture Mart. And a stressful hour later, left with this beautiful device:

Happy January to me!

We’ll see how it goes. Is there anything better than bringing home a new toy?