Green Butterfly Walnut Baby

I haven’t been feeling very creative recently. I’ve been tired, and spiraling deeper into an all-I-want-to-do-is-sit-on-the-couch mood. Trying to convince my daughter she wanted to play Animal Crossing with me. Not particularly healthy. But I needed to get this done, and that was good. Because making things makes me want to make more things, and I could use a little upward spiral right now.

This baby is for a woman who said on the Dec. 3rd give-away post that she lost her baby this fall. She gives each of her children ornaments every year, and wanted this one for the baby. There really wasn’t any option other than making her one. I hope it does her a little bit of good. Half sympathy, and half pagan gesture to the gods, please don’t take my baby away. The constant litany of motherhood.

7 Comments

Add Yours →

The walnut baby is my favourite (and I already loved the other ones) And the gesture… It’s kind and delicate. I really liked reading about it.

i so love this little felty, and was wondering if by any chance I could get a pattern for it from you ?? i lost 2 babies and i so want to make 2 of them to just keep and put on my tree at holiday time as i have never forgot my lost babies and have always wanted something like this to remember them by
kindest regards
georgia from ohio

Oh dear, that is so sad! Unfortunately I am utterly swamped right now with taking a temporary job and trying to continue with my full-time being a mom job. But the shape is really simple and the picture at the top of this post is about as good as a pattern. What I do is cut out two tiny pieces of felt about the size of the walnut shell, you can trace around the outside, and then make it a little bit smaller and thinner. Then I cut a face hole in the top piece and put a tiny bit of skin colored felt behind that and stitch them together with a tiny 1-strand of floss running stitch around the face opening. The mouth is a tiny diamond, and the eyes are curves with lashes, all done with a backstitch, and one strand of embroidery floss. The butterfly uses a running stitch, I’m sure you could draw a better butterfly than that! To put the front and back together I used a whip stitch with 1 or 2 strands of embroidery floss, and stuffed it as I got close to the end. The shape and stitching is very simple, the tricky/time consuming part is that it is really so very very small. I do hope someday to make a ‘real’ pattern out of this, if I do I will send you a copy. Good luck, and I’d be happy to answer any questions.

I just updated the post so that the images link to the larger versions as they are supposed to, so you should be able to get a closer look, and trace the shape of the felt cut outs from the first picture.

Leave a Reply to Katherine Cancel reply