Introducing...

 There's a little someone I'd like you all to meet ...



























Oopsie the Octopus.  Sorry Mandy, couldn't resist getting your hopes up.  On the plus side, you were correct in your guess that my latest project was a little octopus cutie.

I'd hoped to finish him yesterday but although a lot of the day looked rather like this:


my quest for stuffing and a yoyo maker took a little longer than expected, and although the first stages of Oopsie fly by, handsewing is by it's very nature a little more time consuming.  But here he is, of considerably shorter gestation than a human baby, and very cute to boot:

The pattern is a free tutorial by Melly and Me for Moda Bake Shop, both of which websites should come with a time and credit card warning if you are at all into quilty, sewing type activities (there's a pattern for fishies that I hanker after).  It is a superbly written tutorial which I found easy and fun to follow, and I'm not the best or most accurate of stitchy people.  

The idea behind Moda Bake Shop is that you can use a variety of their prep-cut fabrics (Jelly rolls, charm packs etc) to make some of the projects, and although this is written for a few strips of a jelly roll, it was easy to find scraps in the stash.  Actually I think I could make a whole family of Octopi from my scrappy stash with no noticeable indent but that is more a reflection on said stash.

Suffice to say that we have a little Amy Butler, a little Kaffe Fasset, and a whole heap of slices off fat quarters that I bought because I thought they were beautiful.




















I will happily accept that I am a much better knitter than sewer, straight lines and accurate quarter inch seams frequently proving a tad challenging, so I'm really very pleased with how this little fellow has turned out.  If you are at all interested in sewing soft toys, the Tuesday Tutorials at Melly and Me are invaluable - I learned a new way to sew up the stuffing gap so that it looks as much like the machined seams as possible (here).  I've also learned how to make yoyos the old fashioned way thanks to this tutorial, which turned out to be much less fiddly than I expected.

Oopsie is notionally for the little bear - although if the babe continues to take his or her time about making an arrival into this world, we may we find that Oopsie has been claimed by someone just a little bit older.

Well after all, you never know, he could be able to predict the results of international football matches ...