Ruffle your tail feathers

We went to the Children's Museum today and I saw these cute little material birds hanging from the top of a play structure in the children's room and thought, hey, I could make something like that! So thank you to the museum for the great inspiration. And also for tiring out both of my babies so much so that they took a nice long afternoon nap, which gave me just enough time to test it out.

There are a few things I want to try with my next one, but I think it turned out pretty cute! The best part is that it's used with all recycled material. Wanna try?

Step 1: Flatten abandoned sock and draw an outline of a bird on the foot of the sock like below. You can leave the toe of your sock, but this sock didn't seem to have the best bird head, so I cut it out.

Step 2: Sew the toe side of your sock together by hand or machine depending on the material of your sock. I did it by hand in this one.

Step 3: Fill the sock with stuffing material about 3/4 full to leave room for a ruffle tail. I used stuffing I had on hand, but if you don't have any you can use cotton balls.

Step 4: Sew a circle around the bottom (ankle region) of the sock using a long and loose straight stitch. Hold the beginning of the thread tight and pull the other end to close the section and create a ruffle. When you are finished you should have something that looks like this:

Step 5: Close the bottom of the tail with a zig zag stitch by hand.

Step 6: Making 2 wings for your bird. I free handed a wing on a piece of felt and used it as a pattern to make a second matching one. Trace a slightly smaller wing shape on my left over sock material to accent the felt wing. If you don't have felt you can just make a double layer of sock material and stuff it for extra thickness.

Step 7: Sew the sock wing onto the felt wings using embroidery thread or doubled regular thread. Start your first stitch at the bottom of the wing so you can hide the knot when you attach the wing to the bird. I did this by hand and simply attached the wing with the same thread when I got back to the end of the wing.

Step 8: Use the same technique as Step 4 to section off the head from the body.


Step 9: Add a beak and eyes. I used an obtuse felt triangle for the beak and sewed on a little colorful yarn for the eyes.

Step 10: Add a little extra flair- add some beads, a little string to hang it with, maybe some feet anything you like! I can't wait to try another one.

Boy, time really flew by with this project... hehe