Making These Was A Hoot

I used to piece together quilts on my mom’s sewing machine. My sewing skills haven’t advanced much beyond this stage. However, I have boxes and bags full of half-used craft supplies and even more bags full of fabric scraps.

A lot of the fabric scraps were from Jonathan’s projects. I asked him to make me some skirts, in part because I am trying to cut down on the amount of clothing that I buy that were potentially made in sweatshops. (For instance, in the past I shopped at some of the retailers who had factories in the building that collapsed in Bangledesh this spring.) I also had a pile of torn blue jeans that I wanted to re-purpose, and a bag of partially used fabric paints from the aprons that I once made for Jonathan and my sisters.

A few Januarys ago, I decided to craft a project using only items that I already had in my house. I initially tried to make denim owl bibs for my nephews. I got the idea from a tutorial on Pinterest. However, I cut all of my original owl pieces too small, and I didn’t like the way that my project turned out. I later read this article which suggested that some Halloween decorations found in American stores were possibly made in a Chinese labor camp. I decided to make my own Halloween decorations out of the doomed owl bibs.  I then made several more owl decorations after I completed the first batch.

I Googled “owl patterns” and found several online for free. I experimented with a combination of the patterns in order to adapt them to the materials that I already owned. (For this reason, the owls that I made are all different from each other.) I stuffed all of the owls with cut-up scraps from used clothing so that I wouldn’t need to purchase stuffing.

In the end, the only two items that I bought for this project were a bag of pipecleaners (for the legs and glasses) and a bag of Tootsie Roll Pops.

I admit that I felt like Dr. Frankenstein sewing together my own creations out of random scraps of this and that.

Here are some links with real instructions on how to make owls. The first and second links even include patterns:

http://www.pinterest.com/karcardesigns/sewing-owls/

http://www.sewsimple.com/articles/otis_the_owl_patterns

http://sewlittlefabric.blogspot.com/2011/03/owl-softie-free-patterntutorial.html