i love chickens.

for some reason i love chickens. not exactly in a culinary sense. i mean, i do occasionally eat them, but this is not what makes me love chickens. there is just something about these critters that makes me giggle. they walk funny, they squawk funny, and they might be the stupidest animals i have ever encountered. what's not to like?

 

at some point in my teens, i started drawing this chicken with ears (likely i copied it from someone else, as teens are prone to do). true story. in fact it was practically a part of my signature. a few months ago, i even made a love chicken, which if i do say so myself, was too cute for words.

 

not surprisingly, when it was time decorate the label i sewed for my nephew's quilt, i could not resist adding my chicken.

which makes it all the more perfect that in my quest to find a stuffed animal pattern to make the little guy's christmas present, i found this positively adorable chicken at sew mama sew. i am super duper excited!! but don't tell him...it is supposed to be a surprise!

chicken love.

waste not, want not. when it comes to fabric, no scrap is too small to find its way into a project, so i never throw out cloth. thanks to my handy dandy storage boxes i have a place to keep all of my bits no matter how bitty they might be. i even have a box that holds what most would would consider to be garbage, namely bits of thread and fabric that are smaller than a pea. in general i do not consider myself to be a hoarder, but i figure that using every last fragment of fabric is environmentally friendly. speaking of saving the world...i am even incorporating reduce, reuse, recycle into my world of sewing. the mister does not yet know it (although plastering it on the internet is a surefire way for him to find out), but one of his holey undershirts was dismantled. the large chunks went into the closet as dust rags and everything else was tossed into storage box #12 to be REcycled into a shmancy sewing project.

hmm...what to do with the armholes of an undershirt? cut into teeny chunks and voila...stuffing. 

stuffing for what? a chicken. naturally. i found this blog mollychickens that has a header image of ten positively adorable chickens. although she doesn't include a tutorial for the chickens, i used her love bird tutorial to make a love chicken. cute, eh? pumpky, this one's for you!!