things I made (I)

 It was my mom's birthday while I was up there, so I baked her a cake: maraschino cherry cake (an old family favorite) with the "chocolate satin" frosting from the Farm Journal County Fair cookbook - this is a cooked chocolate frosting that is a bit easier, and less sweet, than the standard "juggle amounts of butter, milk, and powdered sugar to make a cold frosting" - you melt the butter and add cocoa, and then add the powdered sugar and vanilla.

It turned out well. We wound up freezing much of it, but that's fine. You can see that the frosting is kind of liquid when you put it on, and it firms up as it cools.

I also did a little bit of sewing. I had a printed cut-and-sew griffin (gryphon? Not sure the most widely-accepted spelling) in kitten form that I bought ages and ages ago from Spoonflower, and had never made up because it looked daunting and I wondered if I'd have to hand sew the whole thing.

I actually machine-sewed most of it - zig-zag stitched it to cut down on fraying; one fault in this design is that the seam allowances are TINY (like, 1/8") and the pieces are so closely positioned that in most cases you CAN'T cut a bigger seam allowance. 

(Just a reminder of what it looked like before)

There are lots of little bits to sew up, and lots of tight fiddly places for turning. In the end, I discarded the printed claws and made my own of felt because I realized there was no way in heck I was getting those sewn and turned without blowing out the seams (and in a lot of places I wound up having to double-stitch, or go over by hand).

This is printed on - I think it was a linen blend they used to offer? It's a heavier fabric and is definitely not the Kona cotton they used to sell (Spoonflower has recently changed their fabric offerings and I admit I'm disappointed they can no longer print on Kona cotton; it's nicer than what they're using now). 

The linen blend was actually recommended when the design came out, I think because it fit okay on the fat-quarter-ish sized piece. But I DO NOT recommend any kind of heavy, ravelly fabric for this - more recently the designer seems to be suggesting the fleece, which would work better as fleece doesn't fray so readily. I was fighting fraying the whole way (which is why I used zig-zag stitching and did things like actually sewed the wings right sides out, so I wouldn't have to turn them).

There also used to be a tutorial online to give help, but that seems to have been taken down (anyway I got one of the dead-blog "medicines from Canada!" ads when I tried the address) so I was kind of left to my own intelligence and experience here. 

Still, it turned out okay, even though, as I said, I had to oversew some spots (in places because I feared fraying; in others, oversewing on the outside by hand because I didn't get all of the white seam allowance caught in the seam).

I was also careful to understuff, and to go very carefully when sewing up seam allowances by hand (and I left bigger seam allowances than I would on, say, a stretchy fabric, because turning a stiff ravely fabric is difficult).

But it worked. 

Photo of "Waffles" (that's what I named him) in my bedroom at my mom's house:

You can see the felt claws. I just cut them freehand and then stitched them into the seam of the front legs.

And some more photos, taken here:

The designer provided something that looked like the tags that are found on commercial stuffed toys, so I decided to sew it up and insert it in the butt seam.

You can maybe see that his wings are zig-zagged on the right sides. I didn't want to try to turn those. (These were the last of the "appendages" I made - I made the tail first, then the arms with the felt claws, then the ears, then the feet, and by the time I got to the wings I was tired of sewing bits. Most of the appendages are attached in a seam or set into something like a dart, so at least there were no raw edges to whipstitch closed)

Here's an idea of the size. He's maybe about a foot tall with ears.

It took me a while to figure it out without the tutorial. At first I thought maybe it was standing on all fours (that's what a tiny mock-up drawing on the print sheet shows) but fortunately there was a photo on the Spoonflower site so I wasn't either disappointed with how it came out or put the head on wrong - it's a sitting griffon rather than a standing one.