More Elephants!

Jen sent me the cutest craft for this round.  I sense that she's loving elephants lately.  I can see why, these little guys are adorable.

effie & ollie by Heather Bailey

She bought fabrics from Heather Bailey's Nicey Jane line called "Wash Day Ticking-dandelion" and "Lindy Leaf-blue".  She also sent three options of felt colors for the embellishments.

I've never sewn anything from Heather Bailey's projects before, but these are great.  The directions are easy to follow, even if this was one of the more complicated sewing projects I've ever done.  I cut the pieces,

Looking like an elephant already!

and followed the piecing directions, attaching the ears to the head, the tail to the rear end, and then the most difficult part, pinned the side of the body to the underside, trunk gusset and body gusset.  Once the first side was done, these pieces held their shape better to pin to the second side.

First side sewn on, corners clipped

Second side pinned on, ready to sew!

Ready to be stuffed.

The only critique I have about this pattern is that at this point the directions tell you to go ahead and stuff ollie full of stuffing and sew him up.  The next step is to add french knots for his eyes.  I think you need to add the eyes BEFORE the stuffing goes in so that your knotted tail end of thread can be on the underside of the fabric.   Since I didn't read ahead (that's so like me with sewing projects, unfortunately) I ended up omitting his eyes.  But that's ok, because first of all, on one side the pattern of the fabric made it look like he has an eye:

See the little green eyebrow over the yellow eye?  Or am I the only weirdo out there?

And second of all, I'm using ollie as a pincushion instead of a toy, so:

At this point, I had "pink elephants on parade" stuck in my head

He kind of looks like a pink pearlized prehistoric pachyderm with those  pins on top.  Or maybe a punk pachyderm?

I love this!  I'm looking forward to sewing the second one from the blue fabric and making it effie, with the flowers behind her ears.

More Elephants!