Bed for Mojo

If you’re following this blog you will know that we have taken in an abandoned cat called Mojo. He’s still with the people that rescued him but will soon come to live with my friend; this week in fact. So he had to have a handmade bed! We came up with the design and thought we could run it up in no time – how wrong we were!

The bed is made up of two layers of fleece sandwiched with some fairly thick, natural felted cotton wadding. This bed-sandwich is then edged with some wide bias binding. The letters are cut out of felt and free-motioned onto the paw print material.

We’d never attached bias binding like this before so it was a learning curve….a very STEEP one at that! We reckon we spent more time unpicking it, than we did actually sewing it! Suffice to say we are not ones to give in – though in all honesty we could have cheerfully chopped it up into tiny pieces more than once! We even discussed the satisfaction of taking a match to it! But we persevered and we’re so glad we did.

We discovered, after much research and patience, that there are several tricks to attaching bias binding. Firstly we drew a line all the way round where the edge of the bias binding should be – and we did this on both sides! Then we sewed one edge of the bias binding in position, through all the layers, making sure to keep the edge of the tape exactly on the line. Once one side was done, we did the same the other side, making sure the edge was exactly on the line. And hey presto!

Other things of note? No need to pin the bias binding to the material. It’s much easier to just match the bias binding edge to your drawn line as you go. In our first attempt to attach the bias binding we pinned it all in position and tried to sew through all the layers. This led to a very wonky edge, and in some places the bias binding was wider on one side than the other etc even though we thought we’d pinned it together evenly. Pinning was also very hard work (and bent many pins!) as in effect, you had to pin through 5 layers! The other thing we learnt, was that if you attach bondaweb to the back of felt, when you peel the backing paper off and try and attach the felt to your material with the iron….it doesn’t work! We figure that this is probably because the felt absorbs the glue? NO amount of heat from the iron would fuse the felt to the material. We got round the problem by using fabric glue to glue the felt letters on….worked a treat! We then allowed time for the glue to dry before we stitched them on with free-motion embroidery.
We love the cat bed…lets hope Mojo loves it too!