Sewing on the edge of a cliff

I had this great craft project I did over and over for months when I was a kid, making Tribble-like stuffed toys and decorating them with Fun Fur hair and non-standard-issue hand-coloured cardboard eyes and feet.

This sounds fairly awful, and though I can remember my favourite one as clearly as if it were sitting on my desk at this moment - it isn't, so I can't post a picture. Let's just agree that this was an enjoyable, easy project with minimum effort and maximum cute, for which I can be forgiven wanting to recreate.

My first indication that forgiveness would be required was the vast and greatly discounted selection of Fun Fur-like textiles at the fabric store this weekend. It was all so much nicer than what I'd used before, and at around $6 a meter, tough to pass up. In the back of my mind, too, I was aware of having just cleared out another pocket of storage space at home.

I came home with this:


I recognized my mistake as I waited to have my choices cut, and quickly asked for just half a meter of the most worrying fabrics. Worrying in that, as I feared, some of the nicest furrinesses shed all over my bags as I was stowing them in there at the cash desk. I knew there was going to be a huger mess when I cut into them, and I knew I'd have to do it the moment I got inside or lose my nerve entirely.

Still. So cute! and what an awesome table covering this would be for non-flammable display items!


The first step in making the Tribble-like Things is cutting squares - one large for the body, another smaller one for the hair. I just wing the dimensions of those squares depending on how much fabric I have. I loved this stuff and (regrettably) bought an entire meter in both white and blue, so I did big ones.

You cut up in one direction, like so:


and then fold up one corner to guesstimate the rest of the square, like such:


To make more squares, you can just set the original on top of the fabric and cut another:


Simple, right? But you can see the difficulties I'm getting into already:


And that's just the stuff that stayed on the table. I bought lint rollers in bulk a couple of weeks ago, but there was no way I was going to risk cutting into this piece:


All those little swirls? They're pretty much composed of feathers and every snip sends tiny bits of them flying all over.

And - oh look, here we are at the cliff.

Several questions occur to me as our path dissolves into near-vertical rock formations:

Will I be successful in my attempt to make functional stuffies out of dysfunctional fabric?

Will my house ever be tidy again?

Was it ever tidy in the first place?

Time (and this blog) will tell... stay tuned!