Animal Crackers... on my stoop?


I love making quirky gifts for people I know will really appreciate them. Ever since I came across a picture of an animal cracker pillow through a Google search, I've been convinced that they were the perfect gift for my incredibly talented photography professor friend, who just celebrated her 40th birthday. There's just something about her cool 50's style and kitschy vibe that made me really want to make these for her.

Somebody sells these cute felt pillows on Etsy...

Except I felt they needed some extra cute... frosting and sprinkles! So I picked up some tan canvas, pink furry stuff and a bunch of colorful buttons.


Animal crackers are inherently imperfect, so I figured hand-drawing the shapes would work just fine for these pillows. Of course, I ran out of big paper at home, so I taped a few sheets of printer paper together to draw out a cat, a unicorn (not actually an animal cracker shape, but close enough!), a camel and an elephant.

 

Then, I cut out the shapes and traced them on the tan canvas, and pinned the tan pieces to the pink furry stuff. I really don't like cutting this kind of fabric, since it leaves little fuzz pieces EVERYWHERE, but this particular fabric wasn't too bad. I actually used the inside of the furry as the outside (I thought it looked nicer), so I placed the tan pieces on the fuzzier side and pinned them together. I cut out the animal shapes with about a quarter to half inch around them (seam allowances!).

 

 

 



This guy is lucky he's cute...

Then, the animals were stitched around the outer edges, with the seam of the belly left open to turn them right side out and stuff them.




These guys required more stuffing than I expected... I had to go pick up a second bag! But I wanted to make sure they were nice and firm... and I probably could have added even more, as few of the legs got a little bendy after I'd been working with them for a while.

Of course, no frosted circus animal cracker is complete without sprinkles! I bought a whole bunch of colorful buttons in pink, purple, blue, green and yellow and scattered them around on each animal. This part kind of took forever, but fortunately attaching buttons is a little bit brainless, so I caught up on some M*A*S*H with my husband while I worked on these.




When all is said and done, I can't decide if I'm a fan of the buttons or not. I do really like how the elephant turned out with the cute button heart (a very loose interpretation of sprinkles). I also love the camel- I think he's my favorite. But the important part... I think Sarah loved them all!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football Blanket Crochet Chart

Image
Here is the chart I worked off of for the football blanket... it is sized for a baby afghan, about 36 by 48 inches, but the chart can be easily modified to make it bigger. I worked the entire blanket in double crochet, and the white laces in the center were made with the tapestry stitch, in which the color not being used is carried across the top of the work and the stitches are made over it, concealing the color. Here's a pretty good tutorial for the tapestry stitch, although as I stated earlier, I did all double crochet for this project, but the concept is the same. For this particular blanket, I used five balls of Bernat Waverly yarn in brown, and almost a whole skein of Red Heart Super Saver in white for the lines and laces. I believe I used a size J hook, which made the project go nice and quick. Adjust the size of yarn and hook to fit your needs- everyone crochets differently! Happy crocheting! :) Update: if you love this football blanket, check out my football...
Read more

Temperature Record Cross Stitch

Image
I tried telling people years ago that cross stitch was cool again... and I WAS RIGHT! Pay no attention to the random pet hairs... I'm in this crazy cross stitch group on Facebook that features non-traditional subject matter, from naughty words to feminist themes to potty humor and beyond. While I don't consider it my style to be crass or subversive, I do appreciate the modern approach to a very old craft that is normally associated with "grannies" (not that there's anything wrong with that, either). This group has introduced me to a variety of interesting new project ideas, including the concept of a temperature stitch. Essentially, each day's high and low temperature are recorded in different colored stitches to provide a really interesting visual of our climate and seasons. This whole idea has my head spinning around ways to physically represent climate change in artsy-crafty form by going through the last hundred years and stitching a huge collecti...
Read more

Kaffe Fassett Jelly Roll Jam Quilt

Image
Here it is! I tried something new with this quilt, and I'm not sure I was 100% successful. The binding was unusual for me. I normally do the whole 2.5" strip, hand-sewn binding thing, but I wanted to try using the backing as the binding this time to keep it simple. I LOVE this backing fabric ; it's so soft, and it tied in so nicely with the color scheme of the Kaffe Fassett "Tides" jelly roll. I have noticed though, that this particular fabric shows a lot of poke holes, so be careful with pin placement and try to get your seams right the first time around. I worked really hard to turn my edges under nicely and pin well, at least every 2 inches. Unfortunately, as I kind of  suspected, some of the loose ends bulged out in between the pins as my presser foot went over them. Now that I've washed the quilt, I can see that I need to do some seam ripping to fix a lot of little peeks of batting and frayed edged. Sad face. I also noticed tha...
Read more