Winter Friend Pillows

I’m enjoying making other people’s projects these days! Like these Winter Friend Pillows!

I really love these little throw pillows. They were intended to be Christmas presents, but they were a little late. The green ones are staying at our house while the red ones found a new home. I’m calling them winter pillows, not holiday pillows. It’s still winter….

As you probably know, I love this book! Pretty In Patchwork, Holidays by John Q Adams. I’ve made a few projects from it, like these teachers gifts.

As much as I love this book, I did find a bit of an editing oversight. The project for these pillows in the book is called Greetings From Antarctica! I just want to clarify… There are no polar bears in the Antarctic. Penguins live in Antarctica, polar bears live in the Arctic. Things like this really bug me! Let’s be smart, people! Don’t dumb us down….

So I’m changing the name of the project to Winter Friends, as in they are all our friends. I don’t think polar bears and penguins would be friends.

The directions called for applique eyes and button eyeballs. As much as I don’t like applique, I did do the eyes! By putting a white circle over black, the black showed through, so I added some betting to my circles, so you couldn’t see the black through the white. But I didn’t want buttons for eyes. And I didn’t want to applique anything smaller than the eyes. I also have those eyeballs you use for stuffed animals, but I realized they wouldn’t work on the pillow. It was my son who said, ‘I saw you had some other round things in your cabinet.’ He was talking about my box of rivets! Perfect!

The polar bear actually had applique eyes (or was it buttons), but I added the diamond shaped eyes in the paper piecing pattern. I love how they turned out, but wonder if I had used rivets, would the pillows blend together better??

I did also change the pattern of the hat to make the white band thinner. Then the poof was to be a button or applique as well. But I hand sewed on a little pompom!

I did the same thing for the little penguins! just used smaller rivets and a smaller pompom. Also, for these little guys, I just reduced the size of the pattern when I made the copies. Next time, I’d like them a little larger!

I chose a freehand wavy pattern to work with ‘sprinkles’ of white to look like the sprinkles were snow blowing in the wind. I think it works!

The backs are BORING! But I’m ok with it, because the fronts are adorable!

And the invisible zippers rock!

I love my winter friends pillows! They make a great gift for penguin loving friends!

 

Wildlife Pouches for Australia

If you follow me on IG, you probably know that if someone was offering a pattern with the proceeds going to help support the Australian wild fires, I pretty much got it! Which helps, but the wildlife rescue groups were also in need of pouches for the animals to live in. So we made some of those, too!

I joined the Animal Rescue Collective Craft Guild a FB group in Australia. They were continually posting that they needed a bunch of joey pouches and hanging pouches and bat wraps, etc.

So I told my son about the fires and the wildlife that were loosing their homes and he was all over helping to make these things the animals needed. He is a true animal lover, this kid! I printed the patterns from the FB page and we pulled out a bunch of fabric. We had high hopes to make a zillion! One of my close friends from here is now living in Australia and just happened to come home for Christmas. He agreed to take them back with him, so we only had a short window to make them in. We didn’t quite get as many made as we thought we would.

The kiddo cut out the patterns. I cut out the fabric and serged the pieces. Then the kiddo did all the finishing.

They were asking that each pouch had two or three inserts to go in it. We made 3 per pouch.

They are now asking for crafts to redirect thier crafting efforts to your local shelters. our local shelters here at home are also always in need. Or to make a financial donation, here. Everything is burned and these little guys need food!

We had fun making these little things and hope they find their way to an animal in need! Now we will look to our pet shelters to see how we can help them too. Despite the sad situation, we did have fun sewing to gther to help someone/something that needs our help. Hoping we can all remember this, not just in times of need, but all the time there’s someone or some animal that needs help.