BROWN OWL

For my third owl cushion I have used some of my favourite newsprint fabric as a background.  It was Lizzie Oliva, the gallery's fantastic hat maker that introduced me to some of the great fabrics you can get these days by trawling the internet.  I often use recycled fabrics and try to use up the materials in my studio stock but occasionally I can't resist buying new, such as this fabric.

Brown owl (height 42cms) joins my other owls.

I have made this cushion in much the same way as the other two, except that I have covered the background material with a patchwork of fabrics before adding the face and strips of material for the wings.  The one thing that I haven't mentioned is the way I put my animal cushions together. Instead of the traditional method of stitching right sides together and turning them inside out and stuffing, I stitch wrong sides together with a line of machine stitching close to the edge. A space is left to stuff the cushion using a polyester filling and then this is closed with machine stitching.  This is possible as I don't over stuff the cushion.  I find this method retains the animal shape better and I don't mind the raw edges as it adds to the feather/fur look.  If the background material is one that tends to fray, I do a line of zigzag stitching around the outline before I start to work on it.