Bugs

You're all probably a bit sick of quilts, but don't worry, I have something different today!

I was browsing through insect related things on Pinterest at the weekend (Theo loves insects, it's his birthday in a couple of weeks, I've got lots of creepy crawly fabrics, can you feel another quilt coming on?!), and Venetia spotted these bugs over my shoulder and immediately wanted to make them.

here

It's just an image rather than a tutorial of any kind, so we decided to make our own version. We gathered up potential fabric and did a very basic drawing...

Then we split the drawing up into 'pattern' pieces and started cutting them out from our fabric.

Once we had all our pieces cut, we stitched the head to the body, right sides together...

Venetia was making the blue/yellow bug and the red headed bug was mine. Wings next.

We had 2 pieces for each wing, we were using wool for the bottom of the wing to give it a bit of weight, and we simply sewed them right sides together, leaving the top open, and then turned them the right way out. The photo above shows one wing just sewn and one already turned out for each of our bugs.

At this point I realised we should have done the wings first and then included them in the head/body join to keep it neater, but nevermind. We sewed the wings on to our head/body anyway and trimmed it all up.

Then out came some giant ricrac to hide our messy join. Some ribbon would have worked too. I had to do this part for Venetia, partly because of the waviness of the ricrac but more because it was all getting quite bulky and she had problems feeding it through her machine.

Nearly there now. We'd cut the bottom pieces of our bugs out of wool too, so now we just tucked the wings up a little out of the way and sewed the bug top to the bottom. Venetia had trouble feeding this through again so I took over this stage too. I left a couple of inches open on their rear ends to turn them right sides out, as with the wings.

Last job was sewing the buttons on for eyes, Venetia was very glad to get involved with this again, and then we were done. Here they are:

A quick and (fairly) easy make for the weekend, and Venetia was happy with them.

Back again tomorrow, Sally