Thursday, July 29, 2010

the amish puzzle ball

So I was looking around for pincushion patterns today. I recently was playing around with traditional biscornu patterns that I found here: Biscornu Basics

I liked those so I thought I'd try some other things and made my way to a flickr group that does a pincushion swap. There were a lot of really cute pictures to look through there, and then from one of those pages someone linked up this: Amish Puzzle Ball Pincushion

I scrolled down to see the finished product and knew immediately that I just had to make one (who am I kidding I'll probably have a whole army of those rolling around in a few days lol). Then I started reading and omg 36 of these little pieces to make it, phew!! (And as a side note it used roughly a 12" by 12" piece of fabric to cut all the pieces from)


I got to tracing and cutting, which I think took the longest part. Then I went ahead and stitched the little "footballs" as I kept calling them, together on the machine. Somehow I'm sure the Amish wouldn't have liked how much thread scraps were left over from doing this on the machine, but I'm also pretty sure that it would've taken me nearly a week to do this all by hand with how angry my shoulder would've been at me for doing that much hand sewing all at once.

Here's all my little "footballs" sewn together and ready to be flipped and stuffed:


And here they are all flipped, stuffed, and stitched up. Just that was more than enough hand sewing for me for one day!


Then I sewed them together at the points so I was down to 4 little football circles, lol.


Then they all got sewn together at the points! All done!

And I included that last one to give reference of it's size. It's pretty small, and my first pattern that I made I went by what the tutorial said, 2 inches tall by 1 inch wide at the middle. Well that seemed quite tiny and I knew that since I was going to do this one by machine, and how I am with leaving pretty big seam allowances that I made it a tiny big bigger. I would say I added about a 1/4 inch all the way around, and it still came out pretty small. I'd love to make my second one like they did in the tutorial with a different fabric for the inside pieces, it looks great. I'm also thinking of adding some buttons or beads to the joints of this one, I really like the look of it on the tutorial. And I could see this being a fun kids or baby toy if I used upholstery thread. Not that I think it isn't sturdy, but I know how kids like to yank at stuff, lol.

Next time I'll keep a better eye on how long it took me, but all in all it didn't take very long at all. I would consider it a good full afternoon project once you get the hang of it down. If you were doing it all by hand... probably a good weekend project. And like I noted on the top, the tutorial didn't specify how much fabric, but I measured after I drew out all the pieces and it was about a 12 inch by 12 inch square that it all took up for this size.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

at last a pattern I can follow. thank you
pauline

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