Cotton Pug

If you make a cotton pug do you then stuff him with cotton or is poly-fiber ok? I'm back at my Fuzzy Mittens pattern and I have 95% of him done.

The concern is eyes, obviously he's not part frog!

I liked the blue.

But I think I'll go with the yellow.

I'll do his ears tonight but I still have to figure out whether to do all cotton or not. It means a trip to the store but that's alright. Let me know what you think!

New Project

I ordered eyes in different sizes and colors and they came today. This guy is the first to receive a pair. He's a project I've been playing with for the past week.

A prototype for, what else, a lip balm holder. I'm not done yet, I've been working on legs and a tail. I used to think crocheting the rounds for a lip balm holder was challenging, now I'm needing to make tubes in 5 and 6 stitches only. Not easy, another lesson that took a while to master. Did I say master???

My First Pattern

Up to now I have been heavily modifying patterns knowing that one day I would need to make one of my own. Well, I've done it and I'm quite happy so far. Mind you it still may not work but we're going in the right direction.

The drawing in the center was my first step. Visualizing a cat as a stuffed animal. Again using aspects of a real cat to make it look more cat like. My model lives with me. But in this project I'm going for a kitten look. A curious little kitten to be precise.

This drawing is small and I wanted to use it to make my pattern pieces, so what do I do? I put it on my scanner, got it up on my desktop, adjusted the size right on my screen and placed a piece of tracing paper right over top of it. I use a very light hand but I trace right off my screen.

The head was a little more work I had to play around with it and the gusset for a while until they looked like they would work. Even then I wouldn't know until I got them sewed up!

Next I like to put my traced pieces on cardboard. A friend of mine gave me tons of cardboard that separated name tags. Recycling at it's best! I have a roll of carbon paper that I use all the time to transfer my pieces.

This is my new pattern which looks good so far.

My pieces are cut out and I've sewn up the head. Gilbert said it looks like a kangaroo head. I think it looks kitten like. You'll notice the safety eyes in the picture, I thought I'd check them out for this project. Now you know what I'll be doing for the next couple days.

Add a Temporary Nose

I cut out a piece of felt for a temporary nose and play for a while. I eventually find a look I like.


This is after I've spent some time in the fabric store pouring over all their buttons. Now you may have noticed in another department there are some screw together bear eyes. These are safety eyes for bears that you would give to young children. One of the reasons why I wouldn't use these eyes is that it makes such a big difference when the eyes are pulled into the face instead of simply laying on top. It gives the bear an expression. Besides there are so many cool buttons that do look like eyes. There's no reason you couldn't paint some of these buttons to have really unique eyes. I'm gonna try it!

But not this time, the buttons I'm using, I use a lot. This happens to be my last pair. The red ones were cute too.

Another note about buying buttons, if you find a style you like buy several sizes. What happens is you buy the bigger size thinking they would be perfect but you wind up needing the smaller size. You'd also do yourself a favor to start collecting the buttons you think would look good for eyes since each bear looks good in something different. This is an area that I invest in.

I'll show you how to sew them on tomorrow.