Turtle-y gorgeous!

We are overrun with turtles! We think they're breeding! These are what we've been working on behind the scenes as it were. My friend over at Indianna Dreams made the small turtle pin cushion for someone in a swap and she linked back to this turtle tutorial from Craft Passion in her blog. We fell in love with it immediately and knew we just had to make them for ourselves.

These creatures were a challenge to us because we had no idea what paper piecing was. After much research, we decided to make our hexagon templates out of card, not paper. That's because they were soooo tiny, we didn't think we could cope with flimsy paper! The finished turtle shells look amazing but this definitely isn't a quick technique! In fact the turtles in total took us so long, we think we even turned into turtles in the process!

As we went along, we amended the pattern here and there! We didn't put magnets in the bottom of the large turtle's front feet. Instead we put a magnet in the middle of the upper shell of the large turtle and one in the bottom shell of the small turtle. This way the stay together but you also have a magnet to hold your pins or of course to use to find your pins! We didn't fill the back flippers with anything other than stuffing either.

Under the top shell we have made two pouches. The larger one is for a pair of scissors and has an elastic/button closure. The smaller pocket has a popper closure and we'd store buttons/eyes inside. Under the bottom shell we put the felt needle holder. We made it of two layers of felt, instead of one.