Lamb Soft Sculpture - Part 2

Last blog post I showed how I created a pattern for my lamb soft sculpture. I have made some progress on  the project, but not as much as I would have liked.  It is difficult to show you how much time went into just the little bit of work that is displayed.  Cutting out the pieces and marking them for sewing takes so much more time than people think it will.  It seems like it just ought to take no time at all for such a small piece.  It actually took a number of hours to get the project to this point.

One of the factors that took so much of the time was the fabric choices.  At first I was going to make the entire soft sculpture out of muslin.  Then I remembered that I had some leftover fusible fleece from the Victorian Belsnickel project.  Word association here:  fleece/sheep.  So I decided to use the fusible fleece in this project.  A lamb or sheep usually has very light hair around its face and lower legs and thick fleece covering its head and the rest of its body.  So I thought that if I fused the fleece to the muslin, it would give the lamb a more realistic (?) look if it had the fleece in those areas.  Then I thought that maybe I should just go ahead and fuse the fleece to all the parts because it would give the pieces more strength.  I was using some scrap muslin for the piece, and if I made a mistake on determining warp and weft I could have some distortion in the shape of the piece.  The muslin was ironed to remove wrinkles and then the fleece was fused onto it.  Maybe fleece was a good idea, maybe not.  It remains to be seen.

Anyway, once the fleece was fused, I pinned the pattern pieces on it and cut out the pieces.  Then I marked the sewing lines.  Some time ensued while I was looking for the tool used to trace the pattern line.  I did not find it.  I finally decided that it would be more time wise to just use another tool instead.  I used wax-free tracing paper and a bone folder to trace the sewing lines onto the fabric.  I had to trace the lines onto every  piece because there will be a middle strip (not shown in the photos) that will be used to give the lamb some extra width.  That took a long time.  The sewing line (in orange) is a little hard to see.  The fleece on the other side of the fabric give so much cushioning that I really had to bear down hard to make the line visible.  Maybe it is a good thing that I decided to go with the bone folder rather than the pattern tracing tool.  Those little dots that the tracing tool makes are hard to see even in good conditions.

So here I am, all ready to sew, and no time to sew it together.  My next couple of weeks are so overly scheduled that I doubt that I will get back to the project for a bit.  I would rather wait until I have time to finish it and enjoy working on it.  I don't subscribe to the work all night to get it done routine.  So the project will have to sit until I can get back to it.  It might be about ten days before I have new photos.

In the mean time, I won't leave readers without content.  I will be blogging about another behind the scenes project.  Check back on Thursday for photos of another project I have been working on behind the scenes.