Fleecie Pets

About six years ago I made a basic 8-colour patchwork blanket out of fleece. I had a narrow strip of each colour left over from that project and of course managed to convince myself that I needed to keep the surplus fabric because I would be sure to find a use for it one day. Imagine my delight when I found this book containing patterns and instructions to make gorgeous little toys out of, you guessed it, narrow strips of fleece!

I had a couple of problems when I started to make my Fleecie Pets. Firstly, which pet was I going to make first...Squealy the piglet, Joe the monkey, Leapy the frog, Hoppy the rabbit, Spangles the cat, Patches the dog, Sniffy the mouse or Fuzzy the sheep? My second, and more concerning problem was that my fleece off-cuts were agonisingly too narrow for the pattern pieces! I managed to solve the latter problem by scanning the patterns and reducing their size a little before printing them out. Crisis averted!

In the end I managed to make five pets, along with some of the cute outfits in time for my 4yo daughter's birthday. The sewing and knitting patterns were very easy to follow. I'm sure it would have been even easier had I been making the full-sized pets, as at times the sewing was a little bit fiddly. I also had a little trouble figuring out how to re-size the knitting patterns (I ended up opting for slightly smaller needles) so the knitted components were a little too big.