Weird Bird in Love

I had a feeling the miniature quilt thing would come around in my head somehow, in spite of my initial lack of inspiration. I didn’t expect it to be quite this last-minute, though, I confess. I just spent the final hour and a quarter of my two-year-old son’s nap whipping up this doggie play quilt – which probalby just barely qualifies as a miniature quilt, loosely defined (it’s about 18 inches by 10 inches, and slightly machine-quilted…), so I’m sending it in to the Whiplash competition…. (hoping that another month I’ll manage something more planned and well-presented!) It’s meant as an airplane quiet play toy. Two little plastic dogs are sleeping in the dog beds (I have a third spare tucked away… maybe I should grab a fourth?).

When the dogs wake up, they can eat kibble, drink water, or chew on their bone. The kibble is seed beads; the water is Friendly Plastic and a vintage button – wish it had turned out better, but I was in a hurry. Then they can go outside to the garden (made from a piece of a sheet my parents owned in the late 1970s) to run on the grass, splash in the water, or interact with the patches I sewed on: bark at the squirrel, chase the butterfly, befriend the cat or duck. Here’s a detail of the indoors part, and a picture of it wrapped up:

If I were the kind of crafter I wish I were, I would have thought this project over for weeks, and lovingly collected bits of fabrics that contrasted and coordinated interestingly and beautifully, and measured and cut carefully, and used threads that either blended in or contrasted pleasingly, and taken my time with the sewing so the lines were careful and neat. Instead I had the idea while putting Zag down for his nap, and threw the whole thing together in about 90 minutes. I think it will amuse Zag, though, and that was the point, after all. (On a similar note, if I were a real blogger, I would know how to add a button to my sidebar. But I don’t, and I’ve now spent almost half as long trying to figure that out as I spent making the quilt. I’m giving up. Sorry, Whiplash…)

I should note that my inspiration (for this project, and perhaps for a certain amount of well-intended creative messiness?) came from this object, created by my mother for her father in about 1977. We were living in Riverside, California, far, far away from my grandfather in Connecticut. He was a firetruck fan, and my mother missed him terribly. Upstairs there are bunkbeds for two rabbitskin mice, and downstairs a map (for locating the fires) and a firetruck – the original was lost years ago; I made the truck shown there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Crafting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.