Sew a Felt Bunny Finger Puppet

Here is a pattern for a bunny shaped finger puppet I made from two shades of felt.

After you cut out the pieces from felt, start by attaching all the light color pieces onto the dark ones. I used a zigzag stitch around each to secure them. Being a seamstress, I prefer to sew things together than glue them, however you could glue on the light pieces to make this step easier.

Then again using a zigzag stitch, I attached the front and back body pieces (being sure to leave the bottom open). Then sewing the paws on top of the finished body. I would recommend sewing the body pieces together instead of gluing, but you could gluing the paws onto the body.

When it comes to painting on the face, my trick for nice round eyes is to use the other side of the paint brush. Dab the end of the paint brush handle in the paint, place on the felt and gently twist. After painting on a nose and mouth, I add some of my very own blush, using a cotton swab.

And that's all there is!

My handwriting - a font for you.

In graphic design I work with fonts a lot. Font styles are incredibly useful and can even say more than the actual words. There are quite a few handwriting fonts out right now and I thought it would be fun to have one too. It was back in middle school that I began paying attention to and changing up my handwriting. Mostly because I admired my friend Christie's handwriting so much, and also because I'm such a visual and artsy girl. So my font is very much "me" but now in quick type form.

 

It is named Wiggins Writing because I am known as Wiggins to several groups of friends and that named seemed fitting for my style of writing. The program I used was a free one, so there are a few issues with kerning (space proportions between letters) but I still wanted to share. Here are links to download the font for you to use too. I trust that you won't be writing any ransom notes with it :)

 

Download Here for PC
Download Here for Mac
(you have permission to use this font, however you may not sell it nor redistribute it)

Background Pattern Refresh - Freebie Tile

With Spring becoming Summer, and being inspired by a new friend’s cute blog, it was well past time to change out my black patterned background. Many of my color preferences tend to change with the seasons of the year, except for green… I always love some shade of green. I also often like a touch of texture. So with that, and my current adoration for simple repeating, trellis-like patterns, I made an image to seamlessly tile the blog background.

It is recommended that if you are going to put your own background on your blog, to keep the files size as small as possible so not to slow down the loading of your page. Repeating/tiling a small image is one of the best ways to achieve this. 

You are welcome to grab a tile for your background too! I made a few different color options.
(You may use a tile for personal use, but you may not sell or redistribute)  

Right-click on a tile to download the image then you can save it to your computer. When you find the design setting that lets you change the background on your blog, upload the image and be sure to have it set to tile image.

How to make a tile: To make the tile I first created a seamless background texture, then a repeating trellis pattern, and blended them together. Here is a general explanation of how to make a seamless background texture.

Using Photoshop I first created a texture that I liked. Unfortunately it would take longer to walk through that process. There are however many tutorials online or even free textures you can download. Basically, I kept layering several texture images and applied an image blend to each new layer (Image > Apply Image).

Although I want my final image to be rather small, I keep it large enough to work with, 300 x 360 pixels in this example. To make the texture seamlessly repeat, choose Filter > Other > Offset. The Offset needs to be set to be half the size of your image – in this case 150 x 180 pixels. My image now looks like image a.

Using the Clone Stamp Tool I blended out the seam lines, b.

Just to make sure it’s now seamless, I Offset the image again, c. You now have a seamless texture that can tile.

After I applied my repeating trellis pattern to the texture, I resized the image to a mere 100 x 120, for a nice and small 31k file.