embroidery « The Artful Thrifter

Here’s a little lamb that I made for a friend’s daughter for her 3rd birthday….

My 4 year old daughter, Anna, helped me stuff the little lamb with carded sheep’s wool.
(It seemed appropriate for the project and it is also much nicer and softer to use than polyester stuffing when making dolls and stuffed animals.)

I used a free pattern from the site Pattern Bee called Little Lambkin.
The only changes I made to the pattern was that I printed it at 1 1/2 times its original size and added round pieces of fabric to the bottoms of each of the lambs legs to make him more realistic looking when he’s standing.

I used white fleece for the main body fabric and brown velvet for the contrasting ear fabric, buttons for the eyes were sewn on with white embroidery floss and pink embroidery floss for the nose and mouth (both colors were sewn with double strands).

I used less than a quarter of a yard of the white fleece fabric, scraps of velvet that I had left from another project, left over ribbon from last Christmas, and buttons and embroidery floss that I had in my stash already. The only costly item was the organic wool stuffing I used which came to about $5-7 for the total amount used in this project.

It was a pretty straight forward sewing project and Anna had fun helping me with the little details along the way. The only trouble I had was the fabric was very stretchy and didn’t want to stay put while I was sewing the body together so I needed to use a lot of pins and patience to get the face and legs right. Overall it was a moderate to easy project to work on.