Thursday 18 October 2012

Quiet Book: Cat

For my animal quiet book, the duck, sheep, dog and frog were pretty straight-foward because their bodies were only made of one material, but, I was trying to copy the animals from one of our favorite books...

So, eventually I came to the animals, like the cat, that had multiple colors and textures in their bodies.

The cat wasn't actually too bad. In fact, I made the cat a bit more complicated than I needed to.

I pretty much only wanted to use scraps for this book and I didn't want to be left with loads of purple fabric. So, to make the cat more interesting I used sheet protectors/document wallet clear vinyl and purple sequins to make the different sections more interesting.

I didn't want to be left with purple thread I might never use again either, so I let myself use white thread. The cat was more complex than he needed to be, but really, not that hard....

The steps for the cat were:
1 cut the main body shape
2 sew a piece of purple fabric (kind of a stripe) to two pieces of vinyl for the thighs/butt.
3 sew a piece of purple fabric to piece of vinyl that will make the torso. So, you should have vinyl-fabric-vinyl-fabric. Lay that under the cat opening and pin more purple fabric under the vinyl (as you pin, put your sequins in if you are using any)
4 sew around the opening
5 sew on the felt legs and head
6 sew on mussel, nose and tongue felt
7 draw embroidery floss through for the whiskers
8 sew on eye beads

The cat is on white because the next animal is the white dog.

If I had to do it all over again, I think I would skip the sequins <gasp!>. I really want them to work, but they hardly ever slide, even with the vinyl and smooth fabric.

Also: I would have put the cat slightly off-center. I love when things are centered (who doesn't?) but centered means that the completed book folds about 1/8 - 1/8 past the cat shoulder onto the vinyl. I really wish it folded on the fabric.

Oh well, Little J hasn't complained ;-)

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

1 comment:

  1. Don't worry about that 1/8! The cat looks gorgeous, and as he get's older, hopefully he'll spend a long time being quiet figuring out how to make those sequins move.

    ReplyDelete