Felt Baby and Mama Elephant

08.31.09

Elephant, elephant
Big and strong and gentle and intelligent,
Intelligent!

I bought this complete kit for making a little felt adult and baby elephant, accessories included, months ago, kind of forgot about it, and then finally did it last week. I am such a retard at sewing and making anything that it took me about six hours to finish.

I traced the pieces on the felt with elephant-colored (silver) Sharpie and cut them out, which was not too bad, though scissoring anything for a while makes your hand tired tast. Then I stitched the two sides of the elephants together, which was okay, too, though the stuffing is coming out a tiny bit at parts where I missed a stitch or it came out. Stitching the beads on the little blanket was slow, and hard to figure out at first, but fine. Stitching the blanket on to the mother elephant was a BITCH. I didn’t do blanket stitch (“blanket” stitch, hehe), I just stitched the easiest way; but it was excruciating. It took FOREVER. And the thing is, the thread you use is so thick that it’s hard to pass the needle through the material. It was extremely frustrating; I would pull and yank on the stuck needle as hard as I could, time after time, and it took so much effort each time, and I was pretty much dying inside. I tried using a smaller needle, but it took forever to thread it, and it didn’t make stitching any easier. I used pliers sometimes to pull the needle through the cloth sometimes, hah. And the felt would rip from how much rough effort it took to get the needle through.

Anyway, no one wants to hear me bitch and moan about the trauma of physical exertion with a sewing needle. It was a very sloppy job, but I think they turned out well enough that you can’t really tell how bad I was at it.

Here’s the final product:

I plan on giving them to my mom, since they are, well, a mother and daughter elephant, and I made it with my own hands; ’twas a LABOR OF LOVE.

Tags: elephant, felt animals, i fail, sewing

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