Chicken Pincushions: Dottie and Rose

If you haven't made one of these fun pincushions, I highly recommend them.  They are fun to make and hold a zillion pins.  The pattern is called Pollo Loco by Miss Rosie's Quilt Co.  I have made 3 chickens so far.  You can also make an egg.  The suggested use is to use up unusued quilt blocks -- or make quilt blocks -- but I have so much fabric, I just found two pieces that went together for each bird and quilted them.

Here are Dottie and Rose:

The pattern maker warns about not making the COMB of the chicken look like the MANE of a horse.  I think I got somewhere in between the two.  The beaks are per pattern, but next time, I may make them a bit smaller.  I tend to grab the girls by their beaks and carry them around.

I recently made a chicken out of denim for my friend, Phylly.  I don't think I took a picture of that bird.  I made it smaller than these because she actually needed another pin cushion like I need more fabric. O-=
I got the brilliant idea to put a weight inside her bird.  I bought a giant bolt from the hardware store and screwed some giant nuts to the end of it and buried it inside.  WHY?, you say?  Because when you pull the pins out of the bird, you don't want the bird to take off.  I don't have that problem really with these larger chickens, but it is still a good idea.

What you do is decide how big you want your chick to be.  I wanted mine BIG.  You start out with a square from 4 to 8 inches.  The bigger the square, the bigger the chick.  Then you make a quilt sandwich with your chick fabric, batting and backing.  You need one quilted square for each side of your chick.  It is fun to make two tiny quilts and finish a project in a few hours. 

Here are close-up pics of the quilting done on Dottie and Rose:

If you love to sew as much as I do, I hope you will try this fun project.  Even if you don't quilt at all, this is easy and fun.  You stuff these super full of polyfill.  I put walnut shells and polyfill in one of them, but be prepared to vacuum walnut shells up foreverafter.

Hugs, Joy