Work in Progress

Today's post is a bit of a DIY WIP.  I had hoped to finish off a small project tonight, but after getting my flu shot, my body heavily disagreed with me.  I'm a bit too drowsy and achey to push through the whole evening, unfortunately.  But, the show has to go in in at least some small degree, so I thought I'd share what portion of it I have done.

WIP is a bit of a fitting status, given what it's for.  Wish I could say more, but you'll have to wait until next month for the full details.  Let's just say, someone else has a bit of a WIP in project going on in her life at the moment.

If it wasn't apparent in previous posts, I like to creep on people's Pinterest boards when I'm not doing anything else useful.  While browsing one board, I came across two really cute, if similar images

Image courtesy of Sarah Ward at Plum Pudding Illustration

Image via Dagmarsdesigns on Etsy

Of course, me being tightwad, frugal me said, "Ding dangit - I could probably make something similar for less than $43!"

So, I tried.  Or, am trying.

I had some leftover fabric from my hippie dress that I made earlier this month.  I wanted to make a fairly sizable pillow, so I cut as large a piece I could from the remainder.

For the various little elements, I bought some fabric squares and dug around my place a bit for more leftovers from previous projects

To make a pillow with appliqués, you have to attach those to the outside first before making the actual pillow, so I began work on the design.  Based on the two pictures, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, and it involved a little cheating.  To make it a little easy on myself, I blew up the image of the elephant to create a template

Cut it out, flipped it around, and traced out the shape

For those wondering why I flipped it around - I wanted to minimize the amount of marker that was visible on the front side, so I figured the side with the traced lines would the the "wrong" side.  However, this became a moot point because I am an idiot and used a Sharpie.

It didn't help that I decided to use Fray Check on the outline to keep the shape from holding once I cut it

And proceeded to repeat this process on all the individual elements.  Pro-tip - if you ever want to do something like this, while Fray Check is a semi-acceptable alternative to hemming or serging, use a waxy pencil and nothing oil or water-based to trace your shapes.  Sharpie bleeds likes a mofo

While I let that dry, I made myself some din-dins

Om nom nom, delicious turkey stuffed peppers

Enough stuffing my face!  Back to work!

Once everything was dry, I cut out the pieces and laid them out, trying to arrange them best as possible

Looks pretty good so far, I think!  But now to figure out how to attach everything securely... @_@

(Probably) on Friday's episode of BEDIS:  The story of how Victoria died in a freak hand-stitching accident.

Until the next.