Simple Fabric Rabbit

Fun New Year’s Bunny Toy Anyone Can Make

New Year has brought up organization of the scrap fabric and therefore - making of a simple fabric rabbit as well! The year of 2020 has been strangely challenging. Not only for us but also our little ones. I’ve found myself creating many activity worksheets, games and even handmade toys. It’s incredible how much you can do with just a couple of tools to make the kiddos happy!

Use up that scrap fabric

Yep, I have tons! Making linen dresses, textile wall art and various textile DIYs always leaves me with boxes of fabric, yarn and embroidery thread pieces. Throwing them away just feels like such waste because they can be reused for amazing and calming projects. I love mixed media collages, mosaic making and patchwork. And ideally perfectly imperfect too. Which is the case of today’s precious fabric rabbit toy. With a piece of fabric, needle and thread you can make one just like that, it’s so simple! There is no pressure to be precise, in fact I deliberately try not to. My rabbit looks like one of these illustrations drawn by a four year old! But that’s the magic of it - just have fun and let your imagination flow!

Simple Fabric Rabbit

To make the bunny you will need:

• scrap fabric
• sewing needle
• two contrasting sewing threads - one to outline the rabbit and one to stitch on the smaller pieces of fabric
• cotton embroidery thread
• loose cotton wool or some pillow stuffing
• soft pencil to sketch the rabbit
• scissors

Instructions:

Firstly, decide which fabric you’d like to use to make the rabbit and approximate size. Mine was roughly 12 x 7cm including the half an inch edge for when you sew the front and back together. You can use many kinds of fabric, felt is particularly suitable because the edges stay nice and neat. I like to use natural fibres so my primary fabric for the body was medium weight oatmeal linen. Also, I wanted to keep the rabbit quite light in color so I complimented the linen with ecru cotton gauze and a piece of beige cotton velvet fabric.

I first sketched the outline of the rabbit onto the front linen piece with a soft pencil. Again - this really doesn’t have to be a masterpiece at all 🙂 Then I traced it using a black sewing thread and simple hand stitch. Remember to also make the face at this point because it would be hard to do later on. Thinking of the different colors of the rabbit, choose fabric to highlight the tummy, inside of the ears and the tail. Cut out the little fabric pieces for each of these parts and stitch them onto the front body piece using matching color thread.

Just a bit of garnish

I can only assume that layering is something illustrators like to do lol! At this point I felt that the rabbit still needed a bit of detailing to feel truly mine. So I used cotton embroidery thread to do some simple slow stitching. Using a single hand stitch and also the french knot I garnished the rabbit’s tummy and bum. It gave the bunny character and beautiful textured shading!

Finishing and stuffing the toy

For the next step I found an equal piece of linen for the back and placed the front piece on top, embroidery facing down. Then I handstitched the two pieces of linen together around where I could see the black outline of the rabbit. I didn’t even try to stitch equally far away from the rabbit which added another lovely organic feature. Remember to leave an opening at the bottom so that you can turn the rabbit inside out. Once you do, stuff the inside with some loose cotton wool and hand stitch the opening to close it.

Voila - a gorgeous treat for the little one yeee! Wouldn’t this be great for Easter too? It’s only around the corner!

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