Is it a penguin, duck or owl?!?

Another baby related post...  The next one won't be, I promise!  Last weekend was lovely, but long - we were celebrating the christening of my Godson (who unfortunately lives about 3.5 hours' drive away).  My Godson behaved really well all day, wasn't phased by any of it and loved all the attention!  I decided that I just had to make something for him as a present, and came across the towel set below in a magazine.  There were a few mistakes, for example in the "what you need" section several items were omitted, and after seeing it decided to buy the book it was taken from ("Made for baby" by DK) as there were many more lovely ideas.

First, I guess you might be confused by the post title.  That's because it was meant to be a penguin set (as described by the book) but his mum decided it was an owl, and another relative a duck...  I'll let you make up your own mind!  This is the toy from the set:

And this is the towel (spread fully):

These two items were all made by taking a towel and flannels and using them as you would any fabric.  It was tricker than I expected - the towelling on the flannels kept getting stuck in my sewing machine!  A lot of frustration ensued, but at least the blue towel was easier to sew - probably because it was thicker.  My advice on sewing towelling-type material: choose something of a good quality that's fairly thick - it will be far easier to sew.

To make the features, shapes were cut from the towel / flannels and then zigzag stitch was used to sew the pieces together - it made a feature of the sewing and edged it nicely so hopefully it won't fray too much.  For example, this is a close up of the eye on the toy, which was edged in bright blue contrasting thread:

Once all the pieces were sewn together using that technique, the main towel was finished by edging it with bias binding.  This was far easier to sew, being cotton, although it did require careful feeding through to ensure that it was being sewn on both sides!

This is a closer picture of the hooded towel's "face" - you can see it was constructed in a similar way to the toy:

I think the set was appreciated by my Godson - at least he tried to bury himself in the towel!  The toy got a cuddle for a while too - hopefully he'll enjoy using it.

Anyway, that's it for this post.  Next time, I'll be continuing on the bird theme but moving away from baby stuff - it will also be a different kind of crafty stitches used!  Here's a sneaky preview: