My brilliant idea was that instead of buying one of those baby play gyms with the themes like “Rainforest Wonders” or “Noah’s Ark” that have the stuffed animals hanging for the baby to bat at, I would make my own little stuffed animals using some bright and compelling fabric scraps I had on hand (I have a lot of compelling fabric scraps on hand, have I mentioned this before?).

I was thinking I could put bells inside some of them—maybe some sort of rattley thing—or even try to find some of that crinkly plastic and stuff one of them with that. Oh, I was full of lofty ideas. In the end, I axed the idea of bells and crinkly plastic, drew some simple shapes on a piece of paper, and then cut it out for patterns. I figured, the simpler, the better and most importantly, the more likely I was to actually complete this project.

I chose a bird, a rabbit (yes, it’s really a rabbit and his name is Mr. Bun), and an octopus. My theme was “Things That Exist.”

[Or possibly, don’t.]

Cutting and sewing the critters together was pretty simple and I left an inch-long hole in the bottoms of each for stuffing. My plan was to embroider some minor detailing (I’m NOT an embroiderer and so any embellishments needed to be fairly simple) but in my excitement to have something that looked sort of almost done, I got ahead of myself and stuffed all of my critters before embroidering. Then I went back and tried to embroider the details on the bird. Embroidering on an already stuffed animal is totally stupid and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

I sewed up the bottom of the bird (and did a pretty crappy job of it too) and presented it to Ronin.

She really liked it! She immediately squished it and hugged it and then started sucking on its head.

After a while I noticed that as Ronin worried the bird, individual strands of stuffing were working their way out of the fabric. I pulled them out and gave it back to her but again, after a while, fine strands were poking out again. I finally took the bird away from her and hung it up on the activity bar that goes over the bouncy seat. She stared at it longingly. I felt really bad.

So… I’ve decided to make her another bird, this time I thought I’d use wool fuzzy stuffing that you get at the schmancy yarn and felt craft store. She’ll be allowed to swallow this one whole if she wants, all parts will be 100% biodegradable and all that good stuff.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under baby projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.