A while ago my cousin Karla emailed me a photo of a sheep pillow that she has seen online and asked me if I thought I could make one for her to go in her upcoming daughter's crib. I looked at it and with my normal crafty optimism, went, "Sure, I think I could do that!" Below is a picture of the original photo she sent me.
When I start a new crafting project that I don't have a pattern for, I start by dissecting the prototype or model into parts. When I looked at this picture, I said to myself it's a cloud with feet plus a big egg with orange slices for ears. Basic circles for eyes. I know ... it's a weird way to break things down, but it works for me. So, I was off to Google Land searching for pictures of clouds. The cloud clip art I found was okay, but the thing I really liked was a picture of a thought bubble that came up on one of my searches. So, I proceeded to crop out the bubbles at the bottom of this picture and blow it up to the size that I wanted. I thought the feet just looked like a tree trunk, so I free-handed the shape and stitched up the middle for a dividing line. For the head I used the basic shape oval function in Word. I also used the basic shape crescent function in Word for the ears as well. I free handed the two sets of circles that make up the eyes.
In the picture it looks like it was all made out of felt with only the body stuffed. I wanted it to have a little more pop, so I decided to make a front and back for the face/ears and stuff the head as well. I did that first and then sewed it onto the front of the body before I put the rest of the pillow together. I did decide to stay with the original felt material since I have a lot of felt scraps from making Christmas stockings. I used white for the body and dark brown for the face and legs. I used a whip stitch to hand stitch all of the pieces together and filled it with a cotton blend fiber fill.
I am really happy with the results. I think by stuffing the head/ears as well as the body and feet it gives it a much more three dimensional look and makes the ears adjustable. It also results in a more plush pillow.
The whole project from designing the pattern pieces to cutting out them out of the fabric to sewing to filling it with stuffing all took about three hours to do. Not a bad evening's work.
