Maisy

Jenna loves Lucy Cousins' Maisy and her friends. She has read quite 

a few of the Maisy books-owned and from the library and has watched 

her lone Maisy DVD over and over again. I generally am not crazy 

about characters but I must say that Maisy is a sweetheart. And we 

credit Maisy for teaching Jenna the entire alphabet. 

It wasn't easy as easy finding Maisy merchandise here as in the UK 

where she has a pretty decent following so I went online to see if 

Maisy softies existed. They did, but they looked nothing like the 

charming two-dimensional characters in the books.   

So in July I sewed Jenna a Maisy doll, which she has since carried 

around quite a bit. I was busy with other projects since then so poor 

Maisy was starkers for the next few months. Worse than the lack of 

clothes was my omission of her belly-button. Grr. This past fortnight, 

though, I rectified the belly-button thing,

gave her some clothes

and made her some friends! 

You can tell by the look on Maisy's face that it was 

all not a moment too soon.

Here's Charley

Eddie (my favorite) in his orange swimming trunks

Cyril

Tallulah

Little Black Cat

Ostrich

and Panda.

The dolls were made of fleece, as were their clothes, with the 

exception of Tallulah's dress and Maisy's and Charlie's shirts. 

All the clothes are removable, which seemed to be very important 

to Emily, who had been watching the progress of this project with 

great interest. The staff in JoAnn were probably not very pleased 

with me holding up the cutting line with my huge bales of colored 

fleece, wanting only a quarter yard of each. I used to like felt for softies 

but have since discovered that fleece is a fabric with much more 

give - the seams are smoother after stuffing. The tradeoff is that 

embroidery is tougher - the fleece tends to stretch, especially small 

pieces of fleece like the ones for Cat's and Panda's faces. I looked at 

Panda's sad, misshapen eyes when he/she was finally completed 

and felt a mixture of remorse and pity.

Here's the Bus Bag to contain them all. Maisy drives several vehicles 

in the stories and I thought the bus was easier than, 

say, a tractor or an entire train.

Lots of applique. Discovered I had an applique foot in my accessories 

box after all - came with the machine and I never knew. I am most 

gratified that the Bus Bag was made entirely of scraps. Apart from 

the interfacing and piping which I went out to buy, I used whatever 

was in the remnant box, including the zip (recycled from an old duffle). 

The bag, surprisingly, took almost as long to make as all of Maisy's 

friends put together -joining the scraps together, I suppose.

 I like to think of it as my version of a quilt.

Why did I finish this two whole weeks before Jenna's birthday? 

Arggh. 

It's all I can do to stop myself wrapping it up right now 

and giving it to her.

Here's another character I sewed a softie of in the pre-blog days. 

Last year I made Lowly Worm for Emily who loves Richard Scarry's 

Busy People stories. His red running shoe is removable too, as is 

evident from the wear and tear in the picture:

and because I had only two children then, I also made the apple car 

that he rides and flies around town in- yes, the windshield is 

transparent plastic. If I remember right, I cut up one of those bags 

that mattress protectors come in. 

It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the car is biggish - 

Lowly himself is about 18" long.

Going to take a break from sewing toys for a while. 

Need to get back to my poor neglected family. Plus, it's

10 days till Halloween and I need to get started on Emily's costume.

Will post pictures of that when it's done and then 

I can finally begin the big sewing project for Christmas! 

More on that later. I get shivers just thinking about it.