home crafts – Dear Liza

Dear Liza,

One thing I love about spending time with Cousin Kestrel is that she is always thinking of new projects. These keep me on my toes as we work together to problem-solve.

All projects involve problem solving…. What fabric to choose? How big should it be? How will we connect the bits? What will we do next? These are the sort of teachable moments that I love to watch happen.

A few weeks ago, when Harold came home from San Diego, Kes said that we should make a new stufftie to keep him company. We dug through the big fabric box and she chose the remnants of the same fabric I had used years ago to make placemats for your mommy! It was very pretty, but there wasn’t a lot left.

Kestrel cut pattern pieces out of newspaper, trying to make them big enough to allow for the seam allowance. She pinned and cut and quickly got the hang of running my old Pfaff sewing machine.

Once we started hand-sewing the parts together, it became clear that our new friend’s head wasn’t big enough! There wasn’t enough fabric…. Or was there? Some clever piecing allowed us to make a head of proper proportion, and was barely noticeable on the back of his head.

By sewing and stuffing each section of the stufftie separately and hand-sewing the sections together, we created a delightfully floppy friend. Kes said the fabric pattern looked like a teacup, so we named him Chashka, which is the Russian word for teacup. Kes chose some weird, wonderful spiral buttons for his eyes, which she will attach later on.