Sew a Wildlife Rescue Pouch from Fleece Scraps

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Your local wildlife rescue wants your fleece scraps!

Not as-is, of course, because what would be the fun in that? Rather, if there’s an organization near you that rescues orphaned or injured wildlife for rehabilitation, it probably needs as many of these simple, easy-to-sew fleece pouches as you can make.

Wildlife rescues use fleece pouches to contain small and baby animals in a way that keeps them feeling safe and comfortable. It mimics the type of pouch that a marsupial animal will be familiar with, and recreates the feeling of a nest for other animals. It helps keep animals comfortably contained while they recover, and gives them a sense of security that a cage doesn’t.

Requiring only four straight seams, these fleece pouches are also incredibly easy to sew. If you’ve got a beginner or young sewist, this is a great first project!

The potential for scrapbusting, though, is my favorite part! I don’t usually like to work with fleece, so the scraps from my few and far between fleece projects tend to linger. This latest batch of pouches, though, helped me usefully get rid of all the last scraps from the mermaid, shark, and mermaid skeleton snuggle sacks that I sewed for my kids last Christmas. That mermaid skeleton, especially, required a lot of inconvenient cuts into a giant length of white fleece, so I am THRILLED that it is now out of my fabric bin for good!

Here’s what you need to make your own fleece pouches to donate:

• scrap fleece. The smallest pouch that my local wildlife rescue uses is 4″x4″, which means that the smallest fleece scrap that I can use are approximately 5″x9″. The largest pouches they need are approximately 12″x12″, so my largest scrap cuts are approximately 13″x25″. You can generally use any size between those two dimensions.
• measuring and cutting tools. After catching my teenager, the most responsible person in the family after me, in the act of using my favorite fabric scissors to cut a price tag off a shirt, I recently bought a new pair of fabric scissors and I changed my family scissors rule to forbid ANYONE ELSE FROM USING THESE SCISSORS. I don’t care what you need them for–you cannot use my scissors! You want to beat up a pair of scissors? Buy yourself a pair to beat up, because you’re staying far away from mine.
• sewing supplies. Because the orphaned baby raccoons don’t care, I like to use this project to finish up half-empty bobbins and my grossest neon orange thread.

Before you begin, contact the wildlife rescue that you have in mind and ask them if these pouches are an appropriate donation and if so, what sizes they prefer. These are the pouches and sizes that my local wildlife rescue has requested, but your rescue may want something different depending on the types of wildlife they commonly encounter. It’s very bad form to burden a non-profit with stuff they don’t want, so do your research!

If your local wildlife rescue doesn’t need any fleece pouches, I’ve included the mailing address of my local rescue at the end of this post.

Step 1: Cut fabric scraps to size.

The whole point of a big back deck is to make a big mess on it!

For each pouch, you will need two pieces of fleece that are the same size. Here are the dimensions of pouches I most commonly sew, based on what my local wildlife rescue requests:

• 4″x4″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 5″x9″.
• 6″x6″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 7″x13″.
• 6″x8″ pouch (opening on the long side): two pieces of fleece that are 9″x13″.
• 8″x8″ pouch: two pieces of fleece that are 9″x17″.
• 12″x8″ pouch (opening on the short side): two pieces of fleece that are 9″x25″.

Because my local wildlife rescue tends to need the larger sizes more, I like to start cutting the largest sizes I can first, then gradually move down the list as my scrap sizes also diminish.

Since the sizing also only needs to be approximate, you can also eliminate waste by cutting pieces between any of these sizes.

Step 2: Sew each piece into a pouch.

Fold each fleece piece in half (halve the long side of each piece), then sew down each of the two sides adjacent to the fold. Trim all thread.

You’ll have a simple pouch with an open end opposite the fold. You’ll need two of these for each wildlife rescue pouch.

Step 3: Sew the pouches together.

Turn one pouch right side out, then place it inside a second pouch. The right sides of the pouches should now be facing each other, but the pouch on the outside should still be inside-out.

Sew around the top edge to sew the pouches together, leaving a few inches unsewn for turning.

Turn the pouches right sides out through that hole.

Fold the pouch that you’d like to be on the inside to the inside, and straighten the seam around the top edge by hand, finger pressing the raw edges of that unsewn opening to the inside.

Top stitch around the top edge of the pouch, sewing closed that unsewn section as you go.

Give the entire pouch another look, making sure there are no loose threads for a tiny animal to tangle in or skipped stitches that would leave a hole for a tiny animal to get stuck in.

This is optional, but I like to wash and dry my finished pouches before I donate them, just to make sure they’re squeaky clean and free of skin oils and dust and dog fur.

Above is my recent donation–not bad for a couple of hours and a bunch of scraps I was thrilled to get rid of!

If you don’t have a wildlife rescue organization near you, this is the mailing address for my local wildlife rescue:

WILDCARE, INC.

198 N. HARTSTRAIT RD.

BLOOMINGTON, IN, 47401

Here's what I did with the rest of that fleece!

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How to Sew an Envelope-Back Pillowcase

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

A pillowcase with an envelope back is the easiest type of pillowcase to sew!

At least for decorative pillows! If you’re sewing a pillow for a bed, do yourself a favor and check out the “magic” pillowcase tutorial.

I like how neat and polished an envelope-back pillowcase looks, even more so than one with a zipper, in my opinion. Omitting that zipper also makes an envelope-back pillowcase much more comfortable, meaning that your decorative pillow can also perform its second most important job of Naptime Support Specialist. Or, if you have two decorative pillows, the third most important job of Footrest.

It’s very easy to make an envelope-back pillowcase from scratch, even if you’re a novice sewist. Here’s how!

Materials

To make an envelope-back pillowcase, you will need:

• pillow form. I’m using a 16″x16″ pillow for this project, but here’s an example of a 26″x26″ pillowcase that I sewed from quilting cotton.
• fabric. You’ll need three pieces of fabric approximately the size of your pillow plus 1.5″. You’ll cut two of those pieces down to size, so read through the instructions first if you have some smaller, scrappier pieces you want to use, and you’ll see how to calculate the exact yardage you need for your specific pillow.
• bias tape. You need two pieces of approximately 1/4″ bias tape, each as long as your pillow plus 1.5″. Bias tape is SUPER easy to make from scratch, so you can perfectly match your pillowcase fabric, if you’d like.
• measuring, pinning, cutting and sewing supplies.

Step 1: Measure and cut your pillowcase pieces.

Your pillow form should have a tag that gives its dimensions. If not, simply measure its length and width with a fabric measuring tape. If your pillow is rectangular instead of square like mine, you can still make an envelope back pillowcase for it; just decide which way you want the pillow oriented, and calculate, cut, and sew accordingly.

The front panel should measure one 1.5″ wider than the pillow form on both length and width if you want a snug fit like the one in these photos, and 2.5″ or even more if you want more ease. A looser fit is easier to stuff and change, but a snug fit looks nicer, in my opinion.

For my 16″x16″ pillow, my front panel is 17.5″x17.5″. Just between us, this made for a pillowcase that’s a little too snug, because I didn’t account for how fat that pillow form is! It still fits, but there’s some whiskering across the width and if it gets a lot of wear I’ll probably be mending around that applique in a few years. So let my mistake guide you, and take the fatness of your pillow form into account when deciding ease.

Each of the two back panels should be the same width as the front panel, but should be only about 2/3 of the length. The exactness of this measure isn’t terribly important, so I approximated, since 3 does not go neatly into 16. For my 16″x16″ pillow, then, each of my back panels are 11″x17.5″.

Step 2: Sew bias tape to the envelope edges of the back panels.

Sew bias tape across one width side of each of the back panel pieces, encasing the raw edge of each. These will be the edges that overlap to create the envelope closure.

Step 3: Sew the back panels to the front panel.

Whichever back panel piece you pin to the front panel first will be the outer panel once you’ve turned your finished pillowcase right sides out. I want my top panel on the outside, so I’m pinning it to my front panel first. Pin the panels right sides together.

Don’t start sewing yet! Instead, next pin the second back panel piece flush with the opposite end of the front panel, right sides together. Visually check the overlap of the envelope back to make sure you like it, and to make sure that the bias tape sides are at the overlap, NOT the far edges.

NOW you can sew!

Using a .5″ seam allowance, sew all the way around the pillowcase, sewing both back panels to the front panel. Backstitch over both ends of the overlap to reinforce them, since they’ll be pulled on whenever you change your pillowcase.

My favorite part of sewing this pillowcase is that I don’t have to leave a hole for turning, fuss with attaching a zipper, etc. It’s so quick and easy!

Clip the corners, turn right side out, press it smooth, and pop it on a pillow!

As you can see, you can do a lot of cute things with that front panel. Here, I appliqued the logo of my kid’s college onto the front panel fabric, but I’ve also pieced and quilted pillowcase fronts, and once I even used fabric markers to illustrate one. The possibilities are endless!

What are you going to put on the front of YOUR pillow?

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Because Protesting a Fascist Government Is No Fun If Your Ears Are Cold

Or, I dunno, I just wanted to make a couple of hats.

I don't have a lot of fleece left in my fabric stash, because it picks up pet hair like CRAZY and is therefore unsuited to a home like mine, ahem, but I learned a new method of making fleece hats that are rounder, and therefore more comfortable, than the method I've previously used, so by digging through every piece of fabric I own I was able to scrounge up juuuuust enough fleece to make two new hats for my college kids.

But what I really wanted to experiment with regarding these hats is figuring out how to embellish them with fleece-on-fleece applique!

Thanks to my Cricut, cutting out the fleece applique was actually the easiest part:

That line of fuzz below the letters is where the sheet of fleece slightly overlapped the transfer tape. Without that tape, that whole section of mat would look like that!

I also recently learned that the secret trick to cutting fabric--especially fleece and felt!--without ruining your cutting mat with fuzz is to use cheap transfer tape. It's essentially a giant roll of Scotch tape, and it's meant for use with vinyl, but if you put it smooth side down on the mat and burnish the fabric onto the sticky side, it works a treat at holding the fabric perfectly for the cuts, then you can peel it off and everything stays tidy and clean!

So tidy:

Fleece-on-fleece is the easiest applique in the world to glue baste, because it will stick forever with just a glue stick, but it is the worst applique in the world to figure out how to actually, you know, SEW IT. It's got enough loft that stitches really show, and it's slightly stretchy, so you always have to worry about everything staying un-wonkified. Its saving grace is that it doesn't fray, so at least you don't have to satin stitch the damn thing, but I tried two different methods on two different hats, and I'm not happy with either of them.

I tried a simple zigzag on the little kid's hat, and honestly I thought this was going to turn out great--

--but I do not love the result:

It would be fine if the stitches didn't have so much... dimensionality? I guess? But at least it's consistent, so I can pretend that it was a design choice!

I hand-stitched the big kid's hat with a running stitch, and although I still don't love it--and I don't love how long it took--I actually like the end result a LOT better:

The stitches still show some depth, but hand-stitching allowed me to adjust the thread tension enough to keep it a bit at bay, at least, and if nothing else, the running stitch means that there are far fewer stitches involved.

At least the back side of all that stitching gets well hidden inside the fleece hat sandwich:

This four-corners business is what I wanted to try. I think it looks stupid with all the corners poked out, but if you keep the corners tucked in--

--I think the hat looks super cute, and it DOES fit very comfortably!

Two hats and one snowstorm later--

--and the kids' Valentine's Day care packages, complete with snuggly warm hats to wear to all the various and sundry protests that college students attend (college students attend a LOT of protests!) were ready to mail!

The secret trick to college student care packages?

Snacks. Lots and lots of snacks.

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I Have a New Personality, and It Is This Giant Bow I Sewed for Valentine's Day

It is soooooooo cute, right?!?

I'm genuinely obsessed with it.

I'm at least two months behind on the giant bow trend, and honestly probably more like six months, but it was the entirety of December during which everyone was showing off their giant Christmas bows on Tiktok that finally influenced me to covet a giant bow of my own.

I figured I could probably reverse engineer my own giant bow pattern by looking at all the million examples on social media, but then I was all, "Don't be a bad citizen, Self!", and purchased the pattern on etsy...

...and then proceeded to ignore all the pattern creator's helpful instructions for actually making the pattern and messed up a bunch of parts and cut the ribbon notches after the fact so I had to satin stitch the raw edges and forgot most of the edge stitching and tried to sub in stash fleece instead of batting but had to iron on interfacing anyway because fleece wasn't stiff enough, etc.

I did remember the quilting, at least!

I had so much trouble thanks to my own cussedness that I was worried I was going to hate the finished bow, but omg I am OBSESSED with it. I'm already mentally digging through my fabric stash to see what bow I'm going to replace this one with after Valentine's Day, and I've got a couple of ideas for custom fabric prints that I want my husband/in-house graphic designer to create for me that would make printed panels just the right size for these bows.

Spoiler alert: would a giant crime scene tape bow not be SO COOL?!?

Here's what else I'm currently working on that's not turning out quite right:

I'm disappointed with the yellow that I picked for my latest cross-stitched bookmark--it's too light! You can barely see it against the white! How do you figure out if your floss is going to have enough contrast with your fabric? Is this when you're supposed to switch your photo to black and white and compare the tones?

Hold on...

Huh! It kind of works, because both of the yellows barely show up, but the green seems super light, too, and I don't have a problem with the green actually, so I dunno.

Ah, well! Spam me with your floss-choosing strategies in the Comments!

As soon as I resign myself to my too-pale yellow pony and finish that cross-stitch bookmark, I think I want to start on my first BIG cross-stitch project.

Check out this cross-stitch pattern I found on the Antique Pattern Library website!

I'm completely in love with Sir Kittycat, and I can't wait to stitch him. Do you think I should stitch the white parts or the red parts?

I need to learn how to cross-stitch super fast, too, because the Antique Pattern Library also has horoscope figures, Aesop's fables, my boy Achilles, and Joan of Arc literally being burned at the stake, the latter of which is, of course, desperately sad but I want to make it anyway. Even though we're not religious, I've always considered Joan of Arc my older kid's patron saint, and I think it would make a morbid, but interesting, gift for her.

So, a giant crime scene tape bow for one kid and a cross-stitch of a woman being burned at the stake for another. I've already got so many ideas for Christmas!

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I Can Mend a Hole in a Back Pocket Three Different Ways. This is My First Favorite!

Just as I promised, here’s my other favorite way to mend a hole in a back pocket!

I’ve got two favorite ways to mend a hole in a back pocket (and a third way that I don’t like as much but that also works great!), and recently, my kid presented me with a pair of pants that had a hole in each back pocket, allowing me to put my two favorite methods into direct competition. She keeps her phone in one back pocket and her wallet in the other, so as a bonus, the holes are nearly symmetrical and nearly identical. It’s the perfect scenario for an experiment!

With the kid’s permission, I mended one hole with a patch on the outside, and one hole with a patch on the inside. Both methods require the same materials and take approximately the same amount of time. They’re also both very easy, with the trickiest part of the outside patch the folding and creasing, and the trickiest part of the inside patch its placement. I showed you how to do the outside patch last week, so this time, let’s discuss the inside patch!

This inside patch method involves just what it says: instead of patching the outside of the hole, you’ll be patching the inside of the hole. The patch will still show through the hole, but will be far less visible than a patch outside the hole would be. What WILL be pretty visible–depending on thread color!–is all the reinforcement stitching that stabilizes the hole and keeps the patch attached. Depending on your goals and your skill set, the stitching can be messy (but effective!) or highly decorative.

Here’s what you need to complete this mend:

Materials

• patch. Match the weight of the existing fabric, but otherwise the choice is up to you! If you match the patch fabric very well, the patch will be quite inconspicuous, but a visible patch can be really cute, too.
• thread. This is the most visible part of this mend, so your choice is very important here. Well-matched thread color will be nearly invisible, but you also can do such cute things with visible mending.
• cutting and sewing supplies. This is a hand-sewing project, so requires a hand-sewing needle and thread scissors. Pins are helpful, but optional. You don’t particularly need an iron, and you definitely don’t need fusible interfacing, although you can use it it–just keep it away from the hole itself!

Step 1: Prep and place the patch.

Cut the patch to be wider than the hole in both length and width, then insert it into the back pocket and place it behind the patch. This is the trickiest part of the whole project, since you have to make sure that the patch sufficiently overlaps the hole, and you have to do it mostly by feel.

Once the patch is in place, you can pin it to make sure it stays secure, but it should stay very well even without pinning. If you do pin, make sure that you haven’t caught the inside of the pants with your pin–the last thing you want to do is sew your pocket shut!

Step 2: Hand-stitch the patch in place.

This is the fun–and a little bit time-consuming!– part!

Thread your needle with the thread you’ve chosen, and then simply begin to stitch the patch to the pocket. Focus on stabilizing the hole, particularly the raw edges of the hole, but stitch over the entire patch area, the more stitches, the better. Every stitch that you put in, however messily, strengthens the fabric and reinforces the mend.

When you’re finished hand-sewing, turn the pocket inside-out and trim away any excess patch material, being careful not to cut through any of your stitching.

I asked my kid for her final opinion (since these are her pants, lol!), and she said that she liked the look of the inside patch better, but thought that the outside patch was fine, too. I will say that the inside patch seems less visible from a distance, but these grey jeans were tricky to match, and if I’d been able to match the outside patch fabric perfectly to the pants it might well be just as inconspicuous.

For what it’s worth, I volunteer monthly with my local public library to mend items that patrons bring in, and I use the inside patch method almost exclusively during Mending Days. It’s especially easy when someone needs a mend in the knee or thigh, since I can use the zigzag stitch on my sewing machine to do alllll that stitching in just a few seconds. If it’s a rip that I’m mending, not a hole, often the patch isn’t visible at all afterwards, and if I happen to have a thread color that perfectly matches the fabric, the stitching is barely visible, as well.

Which method do YOU prefer?

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I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!