Fleece Animal Pillows
So the last Saturday I was supposed to share my latest sewing project, I had nothing prepared and I ended up just adding more pages to the activity book. So for this week I knew I had to do something spectacular to make up for it. And I really think this project is spectacular enough to do that!
The Project
Fleece Animals Pillows
Instructions from Joann.com
Supplies Needed:
1/2 Yard Plain Fleece
1/2 Yard Pattern Fleece
1/8 yard Accent Color Flannel
Basic Sewing Supplies (Sewing Machine, Straights Pins, Scissors and Etc.)
Printer and plenty of Paper
Results
If you actually click over to the project page, you will notice that there are two different sets of directions and neither one of them are really great. So for the most part I had to wing how to make the lion head pillow. Luckily the pattern set for the pillow is perfect. I used google slides to size each of the pieces appropriately and printed the larger pieces four times to make sure I had the full piece. I then traced my paper pieces onto cardboard, for a sturdier pattern piece. (And just in case I fell like making them again, I've got the pieces ready to go!)
And because I was making a lion pillow for Lion, I knew I had to make Blue his own pillow. So I decided to make him a shark pillow. Unfortunately Joann.com doesn't offer instructions for shark pillows and while Pinterest has some shark pillow tutorials, they weren't what I was looking for. What I was able to find was this shark applique
Applique from Swak Embroidery
and I knew I could make a shark pillow out of it. And after a couple of trial and errors making the pattern. I finally settled on making the body 15 inches tall and the fins each 5 inches long. Once I was finally happy with the pattern size, I traced my pattern pieces onto cardboard.
After I had my pattern pieces, I cut out all of my necessary pieces. And I sewed together the few pieces that I could. I put the lion's ears together and sewed the face, ears and front mane together. I also sewed down both eyes and a nose. And with some spare black yarn, I back stitched on a mouth.
For my shark, I put the fins together and sewed the top of the head to the bottom. I then added a big white smile to the bottom of the shark head. And to create teeth I used black yarn and I back stitched diagonals across the white smile.
Once I was done with the teeth, I glued on some wiggly eyes.
And because I live in the south, I love monograms! So on the back side of each pillow, I used some of my leftover flannel from my name blanket project. So I cut out both of their initials and ironed them into place.
The first time through, something went a little wrong and I ended up melting my fleece. So I cut out another back for my shark and very carefully ironed the flannel into place.
And since this was a smaller project than my name blankets, so I decided to try using my sewing machine to line the letters.
After using the few tips and tricks I learned, I was able to successfully outline the letters! (But we'll talk about that later!)
Finally I put my two halves of the pillows together and then stuffed them.
And here is how they turned out:
