tutorial: stuffed hedgie

I've been a bit busy hanging out with the family, so I haven't made anything recently. This project is from a little bit ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. It's a stuffed hedgehog made from a car-washing mitt that I got at Dollar Tree. I posted a step-by-step here, but by no means did I think of this myself. All credit goes to Darling Petunia and her tutorial here. The only variation was that I embroidered the eyes. So cute! I named him Hedgie ('cause I'm creative like that).

   
First step was to get the mitt from the dollar store. I had seen the Darling Petunia blog post a while ago when it was featured on Dollar Store Crafts over here. So I had actually been holding onto this mitt since June. Snipped off the wrist and thumb and then pulled out the sewing supplies.


I had looked for black buttons, but sheesh! Buttons are expensive. I ended up just embroidering on eyes just with black floss, just eyeballing their placement (har har ... I'm so punny).

   
Then came the harder stuff. First up: sewing it up. After the eyes were on, the mitt was flipped inside out and I drew lines, forming a triangle to make its nose. Sewed that shut, leaving the thumb hole open. Once the wrist was sewn into a triangle (and some of the excess material snipped off), it got flipped right-side out and stuffed. Then the thumb hole was blind-stitched closed. Is it called a blind stitch? Like with closing pillows? That's what I've always called it because that's what my mother calls it ... but who knows.

   
Unfortunately though I had finished the sewing, I wasn't done because it looked a bit funky. The mitten shape was a little weird, asymmetrical because it was meant to fit a hand, so the poor hedgehog was a bit wonky. The square picture shows how it was, with the weird corners, and the second picture shows the hedgehog's underside once I fixed it. I just blind-stitched a bunch around the edge to smooth out all those weird bumps, giving it a nice rounded edge. Then the very last step was to sew on a black pom-pom to serve as his nose, and voila! Hedgie is born.


We had some family friends over today and their little boy V is about two years old. He's such a cutie. Anyway, I had put this hedgehog in the storage room that has all my stuff from school and V, being curious, started rummaging around in there. When he found the hedgehog (although he called it a rat) ... it was so cute! He played with it and this sheep that we had. Absolutely adorable. Also, I'm working on a new blog layout, which I hope to be up within the week. It's been taking a while though because while I know HTML, CSS is a bit new to me.