Moon

My little boy loves the moon. Whenever he sees a moon-like image (or the actual one in the sky), he immediately points to it. (I wish I could say that he also says the word, but he doesn't... yet.) He has an alphabet board book titled First abc's by Susan Winget. He has actually torn out the 'M' page and now sleeps with it at night.


Last week I bought some off-white fleece from Joanns to use as a border for my guild challenge quilt. Well, I changed my mind on using it for the border. But then it occurred to me: it was the perfect moon color! So, using the illustration above as my inspiration, I made a pillow.


I started with a compass and drew a 16" circle onto freezer paper. Then I free-handed the crescent shape and added in the nose and mouth details to create my pattern. I used tracing paper to mark the mouth, eyes, and browline, so that they would be symmetric (since I thought it would be weird to have a one-sided moon).


One of the fun things I did on this was to try some bobbin-work for the first time. I hand wound a bobbin with some black perle cotton thread and then used my spare bobbin holder and loosened the tension on it so that the thread would feed through. I used normal thread on top, adjusted my stitch length to 4.0, and then stitched with the right side of the fleece down. The thick perle cotton made a really pretty outline on the right side! This is how I made the mouth, eyes, and brow. Then I just stitched some circles on for the cheeks and used a couple of black buttons for the eyes.


I sewed the inner portion crescent right sides together to create a finished edge (to hide all the stitching ends from the face details), and then sewed the outside edge wrong sides together, leaving a gap to stuff it full of poly-fil (which I had to hand-stitch closed... I tried the machine and it just did not work). I like the wavy look of the raw edge on the outside.

My boy turns two tomorrow! This is his birthday present, and we gave it to him at his party today. But it was the last gift he opened, and it really just couldn't compete with the spinning top he received from Great-Grandma Lu. Hopefully I'll be able to get a picture of him with his moon sometime soon. :)