Thankful for You, Mom

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There are so many things we take for granted. The sun in the sky, the air we breathe, the seasons. Our breath, our health, the people we love. But if there is one thing this year has taught me, it is this: We can’t–and shouldn’t–take anything for granted. Not clean air, not the reliability of seasons, not good health, and certainly not those we care about. We must stop for a moment, notice–and appreciate–every little thing we have. Because we are so lucky to have it, and because it’s not guaranteed to last. Noticing and appreciating. The little things. The present, the moment. The people. This is what life is about.

Today, with Thanksgiving approaching, I want to pause and truly GIVE THANKS. Because although this has been a challenging year, there is still so much to be grateful for. 

We take a lot for granted, things and people. But there’s no one we take for granted more than our mothers. Like the sun and the moon, and the way the world just is, our mothers are always there.

I am grateful for many things today, but want to give some extra special thanks to the one person who gave me life, and from then on always had my back: my Mom.

**********

Ima,

Thank you for caring for me all those years. Thanks for the sacrifices you made, for the tea parties, synonym games, and all the dreams you composed. Thanks for the countless meals you cooked, when you felt like it and when you didn’t. I took them for granted then, but now, when I have to feed my own children, I see them for what they truly were: repeated expressions of love. Thanks for coming to school bringing the sandwiches I forgot, for your help with homework, for your solid support. Thank you for always dressing my physical wounds and hurt feelings. You spent hundreds of hours typing my high school thesis, all 130 pages of it (not including the bibliography), on a typewriter, in those dark, bygone days before computers. No one else would have done that for me. 

You helped as much as you could in every way you could when time came for me to fly out of the nest, even though my flight eventually took me further than either of us had ever expected, and even though it must have been so, so painful. I am grateful you went out of your comfort zone to come backpacking with me in China. And thankful also that you travelled thousands of miles, over and over, to be present at all the important events of my life. Thanks, too, for loving my children, deeply and passionately, and for being such a wonderful grandma.

You are the smartest, wisest, most empathetic person I know. Beautiful inside and out. Thank you for teaching me what it means to stand up for what is right, and for what you believe in. Thanks for being my best friend. Thanks for showing me, though a personal example, what a strong woman looks like. What it means to be a good human being and a good mother. Because of you, when my kids arrived, no instructions or manuals attached, I knew what to do, sort of. I’ve been trying to be as good a mother to them as you are to me. Thanks for being there for all the important milestones, for all the big and small moments. I am grateful for all the adventures we had together, and for all those we will still have.

Throughout the storms of my life, you were a rock and a lighthouse. You always show me the way to what is right.

Love you to the end of the universe and back,

Zwia.

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Who are you thankful for today? If you haven’t done so yet, perhaps you should reach out to tell them. The last few months have been challenging for everyone, so I’m sure they will appreciate your gesture.

If this makes it a bit easier for you, I made a downloadable version of the card I made for my mom that you can personalize. Clicking on the link below will download the image directly into your “Downloads” file:

Download here

Once you download it, you can personalize it:

1) By inserting a picture of your own on the blank rectangle electronically, using your favorite picture-editing program, and then printing it out.

Or:

2) Simply print it out and physically glue your own picture on top.  

Then give or mail it to whoever you want, and pass the love on 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Tree Bark Quilt Series

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I’ve always enjoyed textures up-close. Textures of man-made things like old structures or rusting tools, or the textures of nature: lichen, rocks, cracked earth or tree bark. But it wasn’t until I visited the island of Hokkaido three summers ago, that it occured to me that it would be really interesting to make a tree bark quilt series.

The Birth of an Idea

In Hokkaido, we visited a local museum. One of the displays included felled trunks representing the different native trees of the island. Put together, the contrasting textures were striking. When I saw them, I immediately realized they must be turned into quilts.

Alas, I when I came home I got busy and distracted, as I often do. I archived the idea of tree-bark quilts in my head, alongside many other creative ideas.

Timing is Everything

Then came the 2020 Lockdown. I spent most of the pandemic-sticken summer in my garden, surrounded by wildlife, flowers and trees. My only outings were walks in the neighborhood, on which I noticed the plants and trees in my neighbors’ yards. Some were truly beautiful, like this tree right down the road from my house:

The California wildfires, which started in mid-August, smoked me out of the garden and into my sewing room. The unhealthy air made it impossible to leave the house. That, in addition to the pandemic, was a lot to deal with. I desperately needed to treat myself, to somehow uplift my spirit. So I decided to buy myself something I didn’t really NEED but that I’ve been wanting for a while: a big box of thirty variegated 12-weight thread spools!

I didn’t use them immediately after they arrived. I wanted to first finish my pandemic quilt, and the fire-influenced quilt I started. But I saw them, and drooled over them, every time I came into my sewing room.

Then, one day, it suddenly hit me: these spools were made for the tree bark quilt series!

The Process

I decided to make six quilts in this series. Like all my work, I meant them to be a study of shapes, colors and textures. An excuse to play with forms and color combinations I don’t normally use. I wanted to utilize my new thread, and also to practice my free-motion quilting, something I haven’t done much of.

I began by searching the web for pictures of tree bark, and settled on six general types. My idea wasn’t to copy them, just to use them as inspiration. For color combinations, I was inspired mostly by pictures of Rainbow Eucalyptus and Gum trees that I found online.

I used many layers of fabric and stitched over them, raw-edge-applique style. It took a lot of playing and tweaking to get the stitching right.

I was absolutely smitten by the thread, but my machine didn’t like it at all. It squeaked. Potested. Broke the thread again and again. It did strange things with the bobin. I had to change the tension over and over. My jean needle wasn’t good enough, so I tried a top-stitch needle instead. I also had to clean the machine often, as it turns out that 12-weight thread sheds. A LOT.

The Quilts

Each quilt taught me something. In each, I played with slightly different techniques. They each have little flaws and blemished, but in general I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

This is Tree Bark 1:

Tree Bark 2:

Here’s Tree Bark 3:

Tree Bark 4:

 

Tree Bark 5:

And last but not least, Tree Bark 6:

I hope this series captures some of the diversity that nature offers. We live in such an amazing world with so many interesting lifeforms. Maybe my work will propel people to notice, and more importantly–to CARE. Care enough to help preserve the beauty that is already here…

So what do you think? Which of the tree bark quilts do you like best?

A New Art Quilt: 2020

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2020 is such a round, even, symmetric number. A pretty number, even. After a difficult 2019, in which I lost my father, I was very much looking forward to that beautifully-numbered year. 2020 promised a new, better decade, a fresh beginning, a rosy promise…

Well, as you all know, it didn’t quite deliver…

2020 turned out to be unlike any other year. It brought one calamity after another, in unrelenting waves, from all directions. A worldwide pandemic. Numerous natural disasters everywhere. Daily news depicting one outrage after another in devastating speed. Blow after blow after blow. And then there were personal catastrophes, too. Really bad things happened to really good people that I deeply care about. It just didn’t end.

Some mornings I wake up afraid to open my eyes, afraid of what the day might bring. There are entire days in which I walk around with a lump in my stomach, hardly able to breath. Sometimes I find it hard to function at all. I’m not depressed. It’s just that this year has been really trying. The world seems to have gone awry, and the light at the end of the tunnel feels far away and dim. It’s been overwhelming. 

Somehow, out of all of this, a new quilt idea was born.

The Idea

I had this vision in my head: A narrow grotto with overhanging boulders, threateningly squeezing a small human figure. I could see the scene in my mind, but it took a while to decide how to translate it into fabric.

One day I asked my daughter to take a picture of me in a fetal position, depicting how I felt. I wanted to use the picture as a study, a model for the human shape I wanted to embroider. She took several pictures, and I chose one and printed it on paper. I cut it out and started planning the composition.

Although I was in the midst of working on another series, a series that is marked by bright, cheery colors, I chose to select dark grays for this quilt. 

A Self Portrait to Represent Us All

The human shape, at this point, was still paper, and I wracked my brain trying to decide what to do with it.

Although I originally meant to use my picture only as a study, the more I progressed with the quilt the more I wanted to leave it the way it was. This wasn’t any human form, it was me. A self portrait of sorts in which I am seen on the outside, but am entirely unrecognizable. The quilt itself, or course, is more “me” than my picture, because it depicts how I feel on the inside… This self portrait wasn’t just a self portrait, however, because this year many of us feel the same. This meant that I could represent all humans. 

My daughter took the picture on a regular, Covid-Lockdown day, just like any of the other two-hundred-and-something lockdown days we’ve had so far. I was wearing my Day Pajamas: comfortable, broken-in, unsightly sweats. The outfit, I decided, represented the times we live in and was therefore just right.

The Process

Not quite abstract but not realistic, either, this quilt pushed me to try some new techniques.

I printed the picture of me on fabric, something I’ve never tried before. It turned out washed out and ghostly. I thought that that, too, was appropriate…

For the first time ever, I added details in acrylic paint.

I glued and then sewed the human form into its position. It looked out of place, not really belonging to the world around it. Exactly the way I feel about my world right now, which morphed under my nose into something unrecognizable.

I stressed some of the rock details with crude thread painting.

I didn’t like the white highlights on the boulders, however, and later spent quite some time pulling them out.

Final Touches

The composition was just as I intended, and yet the quilt still didn’t depict the internal and external turmoil I wanted to convey. So I took a picture of the quilt as it was, printed it, and drew different quilting options over it. Once I knew what I wanted, I free-motion quilted big squiggles on the cliffs of both sides, in big, crude stitches (because I didn’t have heavy-weight thread in the color I needed, and the fabric would have “swallowed” small stitched in the thin thread that I did have). That was more like it. In the process, I broke TWO machine needles. I often go months on end without breaking a needle, and have never before broken two needles in one sitting. Somehow, though, with a quilt called “2020,” I wasn’t really surprised…

Finally, I added a touch of red shadow, and my ANY Texture logo in a Chinese, chop-signature way.

I left the edges fraying because, really, which of us isn’t fraying a little at the edges at the moment?

This is 2020 in all its repressive glory.

A suitable quilt to show four days before a crucial election, don’t you think? Can you tell I’m also suffering from a server election anxiety???

How to pass the next four days? Apply every self-care strategy in your arsenal, breath deeply, and hope that the election won’t drop another boulder over our heads…

3D Textile Beetles

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You might recall the Amazing Beetle quilts I made back in the spring, at the beginning of the Lockdown. I knew then that I wasn’t quite done with beetles yet. I find them absolutely fascinating, with their varied, interesting shapes and huge array of colors. They are beautiful and alien and truly wondrous.

After spending the entire summer in my garden, I was eager to explore beetles a little more once back in my sewing room. I was wondering how it would feel to make 3D textile beetles. But I had a few quilts to finish first…

Materials that Inspire

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that my sewing room is in a constant state of disarray. The room is small, but my fabric stash isn’t. I also have a growing collection of treasures, things I rescue from the trash knowing they will be useful someday. The only advantage to having a messy studio is that every now and then you come across things you collected a while back and completely forgot about. Every time you see those things you get excited all over again…

Well, I recently came across metal spirals.

At the end of last school year, as we do every year, my kids and I went over their school stuff. We kept what we thought important, and recycled or threw the rest. We took apart notebooks with spirals to make it possible to recycle the paper. Once separated, I couldn’t help thinking that the spirals themselves might be of use. So I took them to my sewing room. And now I found them again. I pulled on one, and as I did so I realized it would make excellent beetle legs!

Experimenting with 3D Textile Beetles

I printed a picture of a beetle, and dove into my scrap boxes. I picked a blue floral fabric, and began to experiment. I drew, sewed, cut and stuffed, then twisted the wire. Viola! A small, 3D textile beetle!

Using an already-bent wire wasn’t ideal, I realized. It was very hard to work with, and had a lot of twists that couldn’t be removed. I didn’t mind it much–it has its charm, I think, but I wanted to try using other wires.

I had different wires left over from my troll, birds and owls. I now used them to make more beetles.

Each type of wire felt very different, and resulted in a different look. I learned that:

  1. I have a lot more to learn about wires
  2. There are endless ways to make 3D textile beetles!

I’m still not done. I want to try more techniques, more patterns, more colors and more wires. Alas, my brain is already wandering on to the next project, so I might have to do that, first. I will get back to beetles later, I promise!

In the meantime, can you help me decide what to do with the beetles I already made? 

 

Ainu Textiles

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 Discovering Ainu textiles in Hokkaido was the greatest surprise of my 2018 trip to Japan. I knew a little about Japanese textile traditions, but never heard of Ainu fabrics. Once in Hokkaido, these textiles captivated me with their bold geometric beauty.

Who Are the Ainu?

The Ainu are the indigenous people of the island of Hokkaido. Originally from Russia, they populated the island for over 20,000 years. For centuries, they were hunter-gatherers who lived off the land, relying mostly on fishing and hunting.

Ainu Beliefs

The Ainu see themselves as a part of the natural world. They believe that spirits dwell in every thing or being in this world. They regard animals, plants, and things like fire, water, clothes or tools, which are essential for everyday life, as well as things like diseases or weather that are beyond human control, as kamuy (gods).

Bears have a special importance in Ainu culture. There are over eighty words in their language to describe bears. The Ainu saw bears as gods in animal form and as gifts of the gods.

The Ainu collected bear cubs born during hibernation. They hosted them in their homes, treating them as honored guests or as one of their own children.

After a cub turned two, the Ainu performed a ritual called iyomante. The ritual lasted three days and three nights, during which they separated the cub’s spirit from its body, helping it return to its real mother in the realm of the gods. The bear’s fur and meat were considered a great gift from the divine.

Japanese started interacting with the Ainu as early as the 7th century. With time, Japanese immigrated to the island and started settling it, restricting the Ainu more and more. In the Meiji period (beginning in 1868), the Japanese fully annexed Hokkaido (for more on the Ainu and the fraught relations between the two people see Wikipedia).

Ainu Clothes

Materials

Historically, the Ainu made their clothing out of the natural materials that were available to them. These included fish skins, animal hides and fibers woven from tree bark (especially of the Japanese elm and linden trees) or various grasses. The Ainu had clothes for everyday use, and outfits for special occasions such as religious ceremonies or festivals. When the Japanese arrived, making cotton available by trade, the Ainu began adding decorative cotton motifs to their ceremonial garments. They carefully decorated them with applique, reverse applique and embroidery.

Later, when cotton was more readily available and cheaper, they started making clothes entirely out of cotton.

Symbolism

Clothes-making and embroidery were women’s work. Girls learned textile work from their mothers at a young age. The ornamental patterns they used varied by lineage and region, though some motifs were recurring. Some of these included “moreu” (spirals), and “aiushi” (thornes). Women added patterns to areas of clothing considered vulnerable, such as collars, cuffs, hems and backs. They believed that the patterns warded off evil spirits, and protected the wearer.

“Ainu women insert their feelings toward their intended recipients into the cloth itself, ‘Stitch by stitch as the embroidery is sewn, the heart of the seamstress is inserted into the cloth of the garment. When the wearer puts the garment on his or her body, the sentiments of the artisan are said to be transmuted, and the wearer is protected by this passion, woven into the cloth itself, through the protective motif embroidered on the coat.'” (see this article).

The clothes thus carried political, spiritual and symbolic meanings. The Ainu saw the cloth itself as both sustaining and helping constitute personhood. They considered clothes to be divine, and also used them for medicinal purposes. Making clothes, appliqueing and embroidering them were deeply spiritual acts. 

Although I didn’t necessarily understand the symbolism behind the Ainu garments I saw during my trip to Hokkaido, I could certainly feel their raw power.

If you’d like to learn more, there are several books about Ainu textiles, as well as many articles. The quotes above are from this article. You can see another example here.

“Interdependent,” My Lockdown Quilt

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Everything about this quilt took forever. It is the second instalment in my Hands Series, made almost four years after the first piece, Give a Hand. It took six months to make, start to finish, mostly because I left it untouched for long periods of time in between.

Give a Hand kept me distracted during the November 2016 election. The idea for Interdependent came to me during the first week of Lockdown, in mid March 2020. It slowly evolved from there, both in my head and in the real world. I guess the Hands Series growns in times of crisis…

Stage One: A Strange Kind of Euphoria

When the Covid 19 pandemic started spreading around the world at the beginning of the year, there was a lot of anxiety, but also some hope. People all over the globe went into quarantine together. It was the first time in history that the whole of humanity shared a common experience in this way.

Pictures of death and despair were intermingled with reports about shows of solidarity. Italy had some of the highest death tolls at the time, but the news also highlighted Italians singing on balconies. Videos from Hong Kong circulated on social media, showing sports and dance teachers giving lessons from rooftops. People shared pandemic-related jokes and memes on all communication channels, in all languages. There was a feeling of oneness, a perception that we were all in this together. Scientists from different countries collaborated to find cure and a vaccine. There was hope that human intelligence will overcome the virus quickly.

That was the original idea behind this quilt. This connectivity of all humans, regardless of skin tone, religion, or nationality. That is why I chose different shades of the same color.

And why I thought to depict a circle of hands holding each other.

Stage Two: A Sobering Reality

As the Lockdown dragged on, however, more sinister tones began creeping in. It slowly became clear that a vaccine will not materialize that fast, that this will take longer than anyone had expected. Rivalries between nations resurfaced. Racial tensions and inequality in the US came to the surface with a powerful, emotional Black Lives Matter movement. Economic inequalities between people and nations became more pronounced as economies strained. Political tensions grew all around.

Meanwhile, the Earth protested, too. Massive fires. Record-breaking heat waves. Melting glaciers. Floods. Locust. Powerful storms. The planet showed us who was in command. For centuries, humans took and took and destroyed, exhausting the natural resources of our habitat. Now, without leaving our homes, we acutely feel the result of our accumulative actions.

The quilt wasn’t about hope and solidarity anymore. It became more complicated, more malevolent. Dark, like the grays of its background. Yes, we are interconnected, but in intricate ways, both good and bad. Because in a super-connected world like the one we live in, with people moving about widely and quickly, viruses that emerge in one part of the earth spread worldwide within days. Polluted air or water originating on one side of the globe travel quickly, too. As do pests, species which then become invasive, ideas, protests, corruption. And now–wildfire smoke…

The things that threaten humanity became a part of the quilt. As did the self-inflicted threats. I started embroidering some of the major ones all around, on the outer borders of the quilt. First, in black and gray, the natural threats, including the ones influenced by human activity. Then, in red, some of the threats that are entirely self-inflicted, caused by human shortcomings, stupidity and limitations.

At that point, working on the quilt became emotionally difficult. Instead of being distracting and meditative, the embroidering process started taking me to bad places, to pull me down.

I couldn’t work on it for long periods of time. I had to take a lot of breaks. Then, when summer came, I took one very long break.

The massive wildfires that engulfed California in August brought me back indoors, into my sewing room and back to this quilt. I forced myself to finish it. I put in the last stitches under the strange, orange light of a smoke-filled air.

Stage Three: The Good and the Bad

Interdependent highlights the connections between all humans, connections made stronger by the things that threaten our existence:

Climate change. Mega eruptions. Pandemics. Environmental degradation. Global warming. Asteroids. Mass extinction. Deforestation. These are some natural threats, that include the damage that humans brought on the environment. And yes, I know that climate change and global warming are almost the same thing, but I wanted to stress this further, as I believe this to be the most prominent danger of our time.

There are many self-inflicted threats as well, caused by human shortcomings and shortsightedness. I only had room for four: Racism. Xenophobia. Antisemitism. Sexism. Imagine a world without those!

There is hope, too, however. In the form of the things that make us uniquely human to begin with. The things that have been holding us together and pushing us onward. I embroidered these on the inside, at the heart of the quilt, since those are the things that lie at the heart of humanity.

Kindness. Compassion. Empathy. Benevolence. Dignity. Resilience. Love. Creativity.

These, and other unique qualities I didn’t have room for, are the hope of our spices and the planet we olive on. These are the things that might help us overcome the existential and self-inflicted threats we’re all facing. The things that make us human and unite us. These are also the things we desperately need more of.

The Summer That Wasn’t

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And, just like that, the summer vacation is over. The kids are getting back to school, each on their own schedule. Except … this time these first back-to-school days are no different than any other day. We’re all still at home, all day every day, changing from night pajamas to day pajamas and vice versa.

Six months into the Covid 19 pandemic and counting.

Did the summer ever start? It doesn’t feel like it has. If it did, I can’t say where the time went. I certainly don’t have much to show for it…

We had so many plans for spring and summer 2020, so many things to look forward to.

The pandemic cancelled everything, of course.

For the first couple of months of lockdown, while the kids were busy with Zoom school, I managed to find solace in my fabrics and art. I composed textile poems, had fun with textile insects, and finally found the time to play with Ann Wood’s bird and owl patterns to create textile sculptures. I even made three pieces of tapestry with the Jewish Blessing of the Child, one for each of my children, just in case…

But when the school year ended, I put art aside. Together with my family I embarked on house and garden projects. We started with The Big Cleanup, a family tradition that got a bit neglected in the last few years. We did the usual deep cleaning, but also something new. Realizing that school will be remote in the coming school year, we also re-organized big parts of our house to accommodate everyone’s new needs. It was a lot of work.

By the piles of stuff my neighbors left on the curb, I could tell that many of them were doing the exact same. Later, newspaper articles confirmed that organizing/decluttering was, indeed, a pandemic side-effect…

Like the house, our garden suffered from some neglect in the last few years. Perhaps because I put more time into art than into gardening. Not this summer! Once we  finished organizing the house, I put my kids to work in the garden. Together we weeded, pruned, pulled, planted and painted. We even started a Victory Garden. 

Then, a surprising thing happened. Once I started gardening, I didn’t really feel like doing anything else. Not even art.

It was an emotionally difficult summer, to say the least. The news went from bad to worse. Sickness, rising numbers, fear, despair, death. Political turmoil, civil unrest, racial tensions. Economic upheaval, unemployment, homelessness. Heat wave after heat wave, record-breaking heat. My mood went up and down. Then a little deeper down. Some days were good. Some OK. And then there were days in which I couldn’t do much at all.

The garden took me away from my phone, the news, social media. The flowers made me smile. The lush green allowed me to BREATH. Surrounding myself with plants felt healing. So in the garden I stayed.

There was always more to do out in the yard. For the first time ever, I saw the full cycled of spring and summer. Flowers bloomed and faded, others took their place. There were daily little changes. I became more aware of the wildlife my garden supports: the many kinds of pollinators, the birds, the visiting mammals. My garden hummed with LIFE.

I was confined, but an entire little world awaited right outside my door…

Yes, it turned out gardening was another side effect of the pandemic.

Like half of humanity, I was also busy with pandemic domesticity. Although our vegetable garden ended up being a complete failure, refusing to produce a single vegetable, our fruit trees were quite prolific. 

We gave some fruit away, but I also made a year’s-worth of jam.

And baked numerous apple pies. And cakes. And muffins. And more pies. They didn’t last very long.

In mid August, we experienced another heat wave, one that raised the temperature in Death Valley, CA, to 130 degrees, “setting a world record for the highest temperature ever observed during the month of August.” This led to a freak thunderstorm, which ignited over 600 fires all around California. The wildfires literally smoked me out of the garden and back into my sewing room. It’s been over two weeks now, and the air quality is still poor, keeping me inside.

I miss my garden, but it did feel good to reunite with my fabrics. So far I finished my pandemic quilt (more on that next time) and composed a wildfire-inspired Textile Poem:

I also made a larger art quilt influenced by the wildfires. I call it Ashes.

The weather forecast for this coming weekend predicts yet another record-breaking heat wave. I guess I’ll just have to stay in and keep creating…

Small Fabric Owl Tutorial

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Boredom is the mother of all creativity. With everything having been cancelled this summer, my kids had plenty of time to get bored. One of my daughters chose to amused herself with crafts. She made an array of beautiful creations.

At one point she asked to use my fabric scraps. I let her choose whatever she wanted, and a while later she returned with a cute little owl, which she turned into a brooch for me. It made my day and put a smile on my face!

She was inspired by a keychain she saw at a boutique in Japan a couple of years ago. The idea is simple and cute, and a great way to use small fabric scraps.

Here’s a step by step Small Fabric Owl Tutorial for making your own scrappy owl. Try this project with kids, or just enjoy creating your own creature! You can use a sewing machine, or make everything entirely by hand.

What You’ll Need

A piece of paper

Pen

Scraps from two different (but matching) fabrics

Fabric scissors

Thin thread and needle

Embroidery floss in beak color

Embroidery floss in leg color

A thin white fabric, interfacing or felt

Two black seed beads

Polyester or wool filling (or tiny fabric scraps!)

A thin twig from your garden, neighborhood or park

Step by Step Small Fabric Owl Tutorial

Draw a tear shape onto a piece of paper, about 3″ tall and wide.

Cut the shape out.

Choose two scraps of fabric in matching but different colors.

Lay the fabrics right sides together and pin the pattern on top.

Cut the shape out, both layers at once.

Sew around, with a 1/4″ seam, leaving about an inch of the bottom open.

Cut notches along the curved seams.

Turn inside out. Gently push along the seam from the inside, to make sure it is fully turned.

Decide which side you want as the front, and fold the top bit over. Secure with a tiny stitch (just make sure you don’t catch the back fabric by mistake).

Use a hole puncher to punch two circles out of thin white fabric or interfacing. You can also cut circles out of felt.

Prepare a threaded needle, and two black seed beads.

Put the thread in the needle, tie a knot, and insert the needle from the inside of the owl out, where you want the first eye to be. Stick the needle through one white circle, and then immediately through a black seed bead.Insert back into the fabric (so that the thread comes out from the back, where it started).

Stitch in place. Repeat for the second eye. Leave the remaining thread and needle dangling out from the bottom of the owl–you will need them shortly.

Take an embroidery thread, and make three stitches to mark the beak. Tie the thread at the back and cut off.

Return to the thin thread you left dangling. Make simple straight stitches all around the bottom opening (front and back).

Fill with filling.

Pull the thread to close the opening, and stitch shut.

Prepare a twig and embroidery floss for the legs.

Cut the twig to the size you want (at least as wide as the owl’s body).

Put the twig on the bottom of the owl, and make two stitches for each leg. Make sure to connect the body securely to the twig.

That’s it! A cute little fabric owl!

You can use it in whichever way you’d like. Turn it into a keychain, glue on a card, or glue a magnet on the back to put on your fridge. Alternatively, you could hang it on a necklace, or sew a brooch pin on the back and gift to your favorite person 🙂 If you make this a bit bigger, just add a loop on top for a cute tree ornament!

Do you have more ideas for what to do with this owl? If so, comment below!