Owls and Monsters and Superheroes!

This started out as a project to make monster stuffies. The boy and I had done some sketches several months ago, so I pulled those out and made patterns. The girl and I pulled out colors and colors of wool and rayon felt, the jar of buttons, snaps, zippers and other odds and ends. The original idea called for using a functioning zipper for the mouth which would create a belly pocket. This took a little thinking but it wasn’t all that hard. I had hoped this would be easy enough for the kids to do a lot of the work. The wool felt is pretty thick to sew through so they did parts of it but some of it was just too hard. We stuffed the bodies lightly with poly pellets and wool stuffing.

We each made one stuffie and it turned out that we each chose a different one of the three patterns I had made. The girl stayed true to the original monster theme but the boy’s morphed into a caricature of Spider-Man and mine turned zoomorphic and became an owl. For some reason we have had a lot of owl “sightings” lately—Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (an excellent movie by the way), a non-fiction book about owls from the library, the kids have been hooting at the neighborhood owls, and when we went to get the girl her first backpack, she chose one with a cute forest scene, complete with . . . owls.

Happy Monster:

Intense Superhero:

Silly Owl:

This was a fun project and I think we’ll make more of these to give away as gifts. I’d particularly like to find some patterned wool to turn into felt to use on these stuffies.