My Very Own Foxy Lady

Mollie Makes Issue 2

I was initially a bit suspicious of Mollie Makes magazine as potentially a bit of style over substance, but now I'm in love with its cute projects and pages of crafty interiors and general loveliness. I even love the kind of paper it's printed on. However, I remain suspicious of the "thrifting" part of the "making, thrifting, collecting, crafting" strapline as I've spent a fortune on stuff I've seen featured in there...

Anyway, you know the rules. Subscribe to a magazine and you have to try and make at least one thing from it per issue. I'm a bit behind but last weekend I finally got around to Lori Marie's supercute Foxy Lady project from Issue 2. I do love felt makes due to the lack of fraying and the fact I can always make them from stash.

To get started, I enlarged the templates as directed on the photocopier at work, which took far too many attempts. I then glued the templates onto stiff cardboard and cut them out so I could draw around them more easily with my trusty disappearing pen.

The only colour of felt I changed from the magazine was the body. The project uses a rather odd mustard colour whereas I would say foxes should be orange. DH pointed out that real foxes aren't orange but a swift look around my collection of plush foxes (I have several) proved that orange was right.I used a square of Moda Freebird from a charm pack for the belly piece. The only really tricky bit to cut out was the eyelashes as the brown felt was too dark to see the pen. I cut them freehand eventually.

The magazine then suggested gluing all the features in place, which I did. You are then supposed to sew over the features with a small zig zag stitch. I started this with the glue still wet, realised it was a bad idea and went off for a bath whilst the glue dried properly.

I was quite nervy using my sewing machine on such small pieces so I confined my zig zags to the jowls and belly piece. I used a straight stitch over the tail tip. I then used two strands of embroidery thread to highlight the ears, eyelashes, nose and flower and fill in the flower stem as per the instructions.

I machine sewed the tail together first. Felt is all very well but the rights sides out part means your stitches show. I left myself a minuscule gap for stuffing, so that took quite a while. I was concentrating so hard when sewing the body pieces together that I totally forgot to sandwich in the tail and had to attach it later! I sewed up the gap at the bottom of the body after stuffing on the machine and then used scissors to trim any mismatch between front and back.

And there she is. A thoroughly cute, yet fairly easy project that I think gives quite a sophisticated result (would have been more sophisticated if I'd sewn the tail in correctly!). So more Mollie Makes makes in the future me thinks...

Melx