A pain in the (long) neck

This giraffe was planned to be a simple bank holiday afternoon project that I devised in my naive little brain. It is soon to be my nephew’s first birthday so wanted to make him something instead of just buying him a toy. On his pram he has an array of safari animals that all make random jingly noises, but no giraffe, so I decided to try and make him a gangly but gorgeous creature to go in his zoo. I sketched out the pattern pieces then cut them out on yellow gingham fabric, as well as little orange felt ears. I opted to plait the tail using orange and yellow wool, which turned out to be the easiest bit. I first handstitched all the legs, which was fine, until I realised I had sewn them right and wrong sides together 😦 Because it had taken so long to handstitch them and Id sewn so close to the edge, the fabric had frayed so much that I had to cut out all the fabric again. I gave up and got whizzy out to sew the limb parts properly. I sewed round all the edges bar the top one, ready to stuff and then slip stitch to finish. They looked ok so I was quite relieved, but decided to hand stitch the actual body because my lack of confidence on the machine will probably mean Id mess the curves up. I back stitched an orange smiley face and sewed on two buttons as eyes before assembling it, as well as the ears. I didn’t learn from my mistake with the legs and sewed to close to the edges, making them fray and ended up recutting fabric. Fortunately a few hours later and several mistakes on, it became plain sailing. The body was fairly easy to sew together, adding the tail near the end and stuffing it so was nice and squishy. I sewed buttons onto the legs before attaching them to the body to continue the orangey yellow theme. I shouldn’t worry too much about perfection anyway because normally little ones are not harsh critics and it will be covered in slobber from a teething cutiepie very soon 🙂

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