a weekend project

 I spent most of Saturday cleaning my bedroom - there's still stuff (large totes filled with "extra" books and books I will need to sort and decide which ones I'm keeping) that I should consider moving to the storage unit this week. But the room is a lot better, I got rid of some old worn-out t-shirts and other clothing items.

And I found a printed Spoonflower panel I bought years ago and never made up, and this afternoon after church I decided to go ahead and work it up.

It's globe pillow. It's made up of pentagons, twelve of them (so, I guess, a dodecahedron?). They're printed with the continents, of course (too small for country designations) and there were letters printed in the seam allowances to help you know how to match them without referring to a globe or memory (and maybe getting it wrong).

It was more challenging to sew up than I anticipated; in a few cases a bit of the seam allowance still shows through but I didn't feel like trying to fix every bit and maybe distorting the continents.

It also took a LOT of stuffing. It distorted a bit from the dodecahedron shape, but that's fine, the real globe is an oblate spheroid. (I seem to remember there was either a geology-department or geography-department intramural team that named themselves the Oblate Spheroids)

You can see on Africa where the seam allowances didn't get totally caught in the seam. 

And Asia and Oceania. 

I always did like these cut-and-sew panels. Most of them work up flat - when I was a kid, "flatsy" toys like that were super common things sold at every fabric store; many shops had a whole rack of different ones in the 1970s and 80s. (I had several animals myself - a giraffe, and a cat, and a bear, and I think my brother had a raccoon). In the 1980s they did Care Bears and a lot of the Strawberry Shortcake characters this way. 

You don't so often see them any more, though sometimes the higher end quilting fabric companies will do one to coordinate with a "juvenile" fabrics line.

And Spoonflower does them; I guess a lot of people remember them fondly because you can find lots of these on Spoonflower; I've bought and made a few over the years and I have a couple more tucked away to do.