I thought I would give the knitting a rest this week and give my sewing machine a workout instead. I've recently become obsessed with foxes, which as just as well as the house is full to the brim of owls, so time for a change. Hence, I jumped at the chance to purchase this new Baby Fox pattern from Bit of Whimsy Dolls.
Handily, I already had a lovely fat quarter of orange fabric from Fabric Rehab. I had actually bought it for another fox-related project but inspiration had struck so I nicked it for this pattern.
As usual with toy projects, I printed out the pattern, glued the pieces onto thick card and cut them out to make sturdy cardboard templates. I drew round the templates onto the back of the fabric with a disappearing pen.
I cut out most of the pieces from the orange fabric and used white felt for the face and inner ears. The fox also has a cute toy chicken (that made me chuckle), that I cut from spotted lemon fabric from Hobbycraft.
I sewed the face to the head by hand - you are supposed to attach it with the sewing machine but I don't have that sort of confidence. I then attached the safety eyes and embroidered the nose.
The sewing machine part mainly consisted of sewing the matching bits right sides together and turning. This was tricky on the arms, legs and ears as you are supposed to use a 1/8th of an inch seam allowance. I had a few issues with seams splitting, which I bodged by hand stitching afterwards.
Once you have the body, arms and ear pieces ready, you make a sandwich with the ears and arms pointing inwards and sew the whole thing together.I had to go back over a couple of areas twice, but it mostly went okay. I then stuffed the fox firmly with toy filler. To finish the fox, you turn up a hem on the bottom of the body and sandwich the top of the legs inside to sew with a visible seam, which actually came out quite neatly.
The little chick is made by sewing two halves of the wings together for each side and then sandwiching them in the body. My chicken's wings are actually on upside down, but hopefully that's not very obvious. The chicken is attached to the fox with a hook and loop circles sewn to the fox's paw and the back of the chicken's head. My hook and loop pads are self-adhesive, but don't work on fabric so I ruined two needles sewing through the adhesive.
The finished size of the fox is 12 inches. His head is a bit lopsided, but he's mostly quite sweet. As ever, I couldn't resist the embellishments box and glued a little orange sparkly heart to the fox's body and tied a rust coloured ribbon around his neck.
Now for a name....
Melx
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