Soft things

I made this for our niece, its designed to be a textually interesting to explore, by looking, touching and probably licking. With lots of different types of fabric and ribbons, and with two little rats hidden inside a silk lined pouch.

 

 

Making

The rat bag had two sides with appliqued squares and diamonds of different textured fabric. I choose varied textures on either green or blue themes of each side. The fabric bits were cut out using patchwork templates I found in a local charity shop and the fabric itself from my ever growing collection of scraps. Once a scrap was selected, it was chalked around and cut out along the markings and pinned to the fabric. I twiddled with the sewing machine settings until the zig-zag setting was so closely zig-zag-d that it appliqued each bit into place. 

The ribbons came from my very odd box of samples, charity shop oddments, scraps from crackers and heritage ribbons from old sewing boxes. Each one was chosen to have really high contrasts or textures.

They were pinned along one side of the edge, the two peices of fabric put back to back and sewn together on the sewing machine, leaving a hole at the front.

The lining was made from scrap silk, sewn into a little bag, about 2cm smaller than the bag. With the outer turned inside out, the silk pouch fitted inside, the edge was faced with ribbon. I hand stitched the ribbon along the at the front, incorporating further loops of ribbon, making a smooth entrance for little hands.