Toddler Owl - pattern #1351

Back to Halloween and my newest patterns this week.


A couple weeks ago I  posted two blogs about this set of toddler costumes.


Today I'm going to show you how I worked on the face for the owl, and share a couple "oops" I made along the way.

---

Owls have been pretty popular lately so I had no trouble finding cute images on line which helped me make my sketch to get started.

The first thing is to partially sew the hood together and hem the front edge.

Then, I felt confident about the color I wanted the larger eye mask to be, so I appliquéd it on with a small zig zag stitch, but I wasn't sure about the rest, so I cut out felt shapes to experiment.  The black line around the eyes proved to be too strong, I thought.

So I opted to outline the eye with the same color as the body, a rich mustard yellow.

The first time round with the zig zag was showing too much of the fabric through the stitches, so I made a second pass.

It is usually better to do two times with a looser zig zag than once with a super close together one.  Close zig zagging can make the fabric ripple and the more I looked at the stitching around the larger eye mask, it was really bothering me how ripply it was. (look at the photos above) I couldn't steam it out either.  So ... out comes the good old seam ripper.

And I CAREFULLY picked out the stitches all around the light yellow eye mask, inside and out.

And restitched it with a looser zig zag.  It's polar fleece and the thread is going over fabric the exact same color, so a close stitch really isn't needed.

Now for the beak.  Even though the seam allowance was small to start off with, I trimmed it down to about 1/8" so it would look smooth after turning and stuffing.

Then I stuffed it and pinned it in place.

And zig zagged around it ... pretty cute!

BUT!!! &#*%#)!

Dang ... I hate it when that happens! I caught some of the other part of the hood when stitching the beak ... well I'm getting a good workout with the seam ripper ... ha ha!

Here he is all done.  The wings were very easy.  Separate shapes with batting inside then just hand tacked to the sleeves.


Next time ... the costume corsets and skirts.