Wonderful embroidery portraits from Naomi Cayne. She also touches on koalas, robots, and bicycles.

They work! These are just a slightly off-square quilted piece with velcro sewn into the corners. Fully machine washable for when they inevitably become gross, and a helpful mini test of some quilting material I got (there’s a thin strip of cotton batting in each one.

I am going completely bonkers, though, because Mr Bun has been playing with the cat pant for WEEKS now, and I still can’t get a good picture of him in action. One day soon!

The final piece will have fleece on the inside and wool on the outside, be circular, and will have quilting on the bottom side, but I wanted to piece it together and figure out how I would finish all the seams before I actually cut into the fabric (which is pretty nice). Before I sewed this, I sketched it on paper and then pieced one together with tape and napkins, and those exercises were very helpful. This little fabric piece came together in about 5 minutes and disproved a concern I had about how I should pattern it, so it was both very satisfying and genuinely helpful.

Mr Bun stuck his head into it but declined to be photographed.

Behold its sloppy seams and uneven edges! Also, because the material is thin and unlined with tissue paper, the top falls off. Nevertheless, a successful first outing. It’s always good to remind yourself how much easier doing a good job looks once you just plain finish a not-so-great one.

Tonight I decided to go a little further, starting with a detailed sketch of a proposed toy, including all the pattern pieces, where the stitching goes, where the detailing goes, and notes about all the materials. For this example I chose a sushi. It’s a simple shape but not obvious if you want to use a sewing machine for close to all the major seams.

I initially worked out piecing this together in my head on a bike ride, during which I realized that the way I wanted to assemble it (with a pretty good chunk of embroidery for detailing the top of the sushi roll) would involve LOTS of hand-sewn thread, which is not a great thing for a cat toy – too easy to loosen and possibly swallow. That made this object a particularly good choice for that standby of the user-interface designer: the paper prototype!

I think I’ll be doing more with paper—just for itself, too.

Anyway, here is the “peritoneum” – it’s for a seed-filled toy, and this is the inner bag that holds the seeds. It’s only clipped shut for now, because I need to pick up some more seeds before I sew it shut.

No, I wasn’t trying to say anything about blood supply in the kidneys – I was just using leftover pieces of embroidery floss, and I didn’t have enough to do all the appliques in a single color.

I briefly thought about putting a spine and part of the ribcage on the back, and then I remember this little thing will be boneless.

Making my daily thing something that isn’t writing might make this harder – I guess I’ll find out in September!

Anyway, here is my first thing: a Flying Spaghetti Monster cat toy. I dithered for a couple of weeks over putting this together, because my first couple of tries really didn’t work at all. This doesn’t match my vision, either, but, hey, the FSM is filled with catnip (little-known fact!), and Mr Bun embraced it with all 4 paws.

So I ripped out all my failed stitches and tried French knots in 5 different sizes … in these breaking waves. Yay!

The eyes are much lighter in this picture only partly because they light was different; in the first picture, the fabric and floss were still wet from being rinsed.

This is from a simple design I sketched (and then, oddly, ended up reversing horizontally when I freehanded the silhouette onto the felt).

Learning a different stitch (split stitch). I made a nest out of herringbone stitches, but it ended up looking just plain awful!

It wasn’t until I was actually sitting down at the sewing machine that I realized I’d set myself up for a crash course in sewing on a curve. I think I did OK, although I’m starting to see why quilters like having fancy anti-pucker features in their machines. And if my cat could just pull himself away from the cat chaise, we might see what he thinks of his new quilt.

I ended up making a lot more cuts to get more spreads and thus needing to “bind” my book, which I did with jewelry wire and beads. With less cutting than I originally used but 1 cut more than the single-sided version calls for, the book still doesn’t need to have a spine or stitching and can have 4 spreads. I used the following pattern (in which you would fold on the dotted lines and cut on the solid lines):

My goal was to do all the printing on a single sheet of paper, and then fold and cut to get a tiny book that needed no binding. (I did glue the blank [backs of the] pages.) And I got this:

There. Now I can move on to accordion books and stab-stitch books.

This tasseled cushion (velvet, metallic fabric for edging, batting, silvery tassels, pewter button) is the final piece of my modification of the Cat Chaise. The cushion is tied to the frame of the chaise with silvery ribbon (hidden from prying claws).

How does he feel about it?

Mr Bun seemed traumatized by the unnecessary destruction of a cardboard box, but I predict he will have napped on it within 12 hours.

This particular thing is made of silly Valentine’s Day fabric from the remnants bin (I know, hard to believe!), stuffed with batting with a fragrant catnip center. I felt a bit bad about my sloppy hemming – I have a lot to learn about sewing (machine and manual) on a curve. Did he like it anyway?

Oh yeah.

This particular thing is made of felt, buttons, and polyester batting, and is inspired by this: www.geist.com/comix – Thanks, Eve Corbel!