The Owl Pillow That Isn't

I guess I'm pretty lucky, most often when I get an idea or see an idea from someone else's work, I can dig in and make it. Sure - it's not always just what I had in mind - but it works.

Well I saw this pattern somewhere on the world wide web some time ago and thought it was a great idea. It appeared that an owl face and outline was either painted or drawn on a beautiful wool fabric. (I apologize for not giving full credit to the original artist - I'm sometimes so bad about noting where I get ideas from so I can't point back to it when the proper time comes.)

I remembered a wonderful gray wool that I had stashed away for years - waiting for the right project to come along. I dug it out and proceeded to drawn the owl faces on the fabric - intending to sew each individual one into a small pillow-like piece.

I started the process by using a permanent black marker thinking that it would certainly work well - easy to draw with - and it's permanent, right?

After utilizing all of the fabric I had, I started to cut out shapes to sew the pieces together for the pillow - and realized that the marker was rubbing horribly off on my fingers. Sure - it was still permanently on the fabric - but it was also on my fingers.

I decided to try washing the already marked fabric to see if I could wash away the residue that was coming off on my fingers. I was able to do that - and able to get the marker to stop bleeding from the fabric - but by that time, the design was so light that it wasn't strong enough to look ok on the pillow.

So....I now have about 10 cute little faded owl faces with no place to go and no place to call home. All-in-all, kind of a failure project, but I guess I learned from it. I've also debated whether I want to try hand stitching the design with black wool yarn/thread, but gosh, that seems like a lot of hard work. In the meantime, this project will sit in the undone world of my fabrics and projects.