6/03/2010

Great Owl Crochet-Along - Finishing Your Eyes


Hopefully, you've had enough time to make your owl eyes - so, the thing to do now is get them finished up. Let's walk through the process step by step.

1. Sew the iris.
The pattern includes instructions for stitching a t-shaped iris (as shown in the finished owl eye photo above). But as you've already seen from the owls rolling in to our Flikr group -- you're not limited to this. Stina, of Get Lucky Designs, gave her owl a more feminine sleepy-head look by stitching a half circle eye lid with long lashes.


And the lovely Princess Crafts A Lot, Shanny, had some more fin with the dynamic superhero team -- sleepy owl and wide-awake owl.


Long story short -- the only limit is your imagination!

2. Stitch the eyes together.
The next step is sewing your eyes together. We sew them together (as opposed to trying to attach them very close together when doing the applique) because of the stuffing. If your owl's eyes are not sewn together when you stuff the little guy, a gap is going to open up between them. Trust me... it does not make for the most endearing little owl face.

To sew the eyes together, pick up the tail from one of the eyes and thread it through your needle. Line the two eyes up together so that the irises will be level when they are finally stitched together.

The trick to getting your stitches to look nice is to match one for one. If you look closely at the image below, I'm working through the back loops of the finished eyes and matching the stitches together (as opposed to skipping some).


Note that I chose to work through the back loops so that the edges of the eyes would have a little ridge between them. If you prefer not to define the eyes with a ridge, sew through the front loops instead.


You should sew between 5-6 stitches together in order to get a nice seam and then finish off.


I'm planning to use safety eyes on a couple of my finished owls, so I left the iris off on a few of the finished pairs. I've never tried safety eyes on the owl pattern before, so we'll see how this experiment goes together!

2 comments:

  1. These little tutorials are EXTREMELY helpful :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Becky - you're such a dear! Thanks for cheer leading me too!

    ReplyDelete

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