Olaf Pillow

And.... here we are a month later with a few projects to post.  December just flies by every year, doesn't it?!

******

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last fifteen months, you must have met Olaf...

This pillow was a whip-up for a little first grade girl celebrating her birthday with a Frozen party.  I think this might have been our second, if not third, Frozen themed elementary school girly birthday party.  For a previous party, we made this pillowcase, designed by Leah.  The December party was for Grace's adorable little best friend and it was an Olaf party (meaning they decorated snowman shaped cookies).  Grace declared that the gift HAD to be Olaf because it was an Olaf party.  I tried to sway her toward a more neutral/girly gift but there was no budging my stubborn little girl.  Olaf it must be, so Olaf it was.  I did convince her that an Olaf pillow was better (read: infinitely easier to make) than an actual stuffed Olaf.

We took this page from a Frozen sticker book we had floating around the house and I traced it to get a line drawing of the cute little snowman guy.

Here is the hand embroidery - I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

The body is dark grey, stick arms and hair are brown, and I had to go out and buy the orange for the nose because I did not have any carrot orange in my embroidery floss stash.  Imagine that.  

The two girls and I experimented and sketched that carrot nose a million times trying to figure out how to have realistic carrot lines on it similar to the shading in the sticker book.  After many goofy looking carrots that we all thought looked bad it was Grace who finally said, "Why can't you just fill it in all orange?"  Bingo - it worked perfectly and looked far better than any of our sketches.  I guess it didn't occur to me to fill it in since the rest of the drawing was just lines.  I did a sort of long-and-short stitch to fill it in because it was a bit big for satin stitch and I thought the texture was cool.  

We bordered it in pink (Grace's no-budging choice as well - she wouldn't let me do Frozen-blue or even Frozen themed fabric).  I just tried to ignore the clash of pink with carrot orange as best I could.  

Its a 14'' pillow (store bought pillow form) with an invisible zipper in the bottom so it can be washed.  

The gift opening at the party was an absolute flurry of craziness so there was no moment of "Oh, how cute" or "I love it", much to Grace's chagrin.  I have no doubt, however, that the little girl loves her Olaf pillow.  

Shockingly, there have been no pleas of "Can you make me one too?" so I'm just going to let that sleeping dog lie....