2012 wrap-up: Ellie the elephant

I made this super cute elephant softie for a friend of Isaac's second birthday. I used the Effie and Ollie pattern by Heather Bailey. I highly recommend it. It didn't take too long, especially considering the amount of tiny pieces and curves you have to sew. I've found that the keys to sewing curves are going slow, decreasing the stitch length, and using the handwheel for a few stitches when curves are especially tight. I only had to rip out and redo one seam for this little guy.

 



I feel like it took a quarter bag of stuffing to fill this small elephant. I used a stuffing fork, which really helped to fill the trunk and legs.



When I do this again, I would do two things differently:  1) iron the fusible interfacing to the fabric before cutting the pieces. Every piece is interfaced anyway, so this would save you from having to cut each tiny piece out twice, and then iron them together. 2) the tail is impossibly tiny and you are supposed to turn it inside out. Sure it looks nice but it took 10 minutes. There are other ways to do it that would be a lot quicker and not require pins, tweezers, another smaller pair of tweezers and cursing.