softie | stay.at.home.life

I dont know if I have ever mentioned here before my love of elephants? Anyway, I think they are very awesome animals, and elephant toys are the cutest. I actually made this a while ago, but never got around to blogging about it. I have been soooo slack this school holidays, so this is my token effort for the week.

I just googled elephant softie pattern until I found something that looked simple enough. I copied the image, pasted into a word doc and blew up as big as I could. Printed it out and stuck it all together again!

The kids helped cut out all the pieces, pin them to the fabric and cut out the fabric. Then it was sewing time.

I really didn’t take enough photos through this process, but it was all very straight forward. The line across the middle is the piece you need to make for the inside of the legs. You can see this piece folded over in the image below.

Now here is a hint – make sure you put the eyes on BEFORE you finish sewing it. Because this little guy is now getting around the house blind, as I couldn’t put the backs on his eyes!

Anyway, we love the little blind guy. I want to make a whole herd!

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So my scrap material collection is looking quite impressive at the moment, I thought I’d give another softie a whirl. I was ready to make an owl or elephant, but DS talked me into a snake. That sounded easy enough to make with no pattern. We discussed how big he would like it and he picked out the colours (to match the colours in his room).

I free hand drew a template for the top ‘scales’ panel of the snake.

Then, with a bit of fiddling around, joined them together, flat edge to flat edge to make the top part of the snake – less the head;

Sewing along the flat side between each section (I only picked the wrong side once, lol)

Make the last panel only a half panel, so the head will eventually be facing forward. Once sewn, iron flat. Then lay on chosen fabric for underside of snake. Trace around the edge to make it the same size. I drew the underside of the head in at this point too.

For the top part of the head, I cut out and extra diomand shape, cut a slit into the centre of the head, and sewed the diamond in, to create a 3rd dimension. Don’t forget to add the eyes BEFORE you start stuffing. Hand stitch along the back of the neck (you can use this opportunity to tuck in and create a bend in the neck too if you like.