bunny love

I love love holidays – a reason to celebrate.  More than the actual holiday, I love the lead up to the day.  The prep.  The crafts and baking. The planning. The excitement making.  The dreaming of what might be and what could be.  Christmas is by far my fav, but birthdays, Easter, Valentines day and summer parties are all very special as well.  This year the kids know that Easter is coming, we even have a bunny living in our yard that contributes to the excitement (he is clearly scouting locations for an egg hunt …).

Our girls love dinosaurs and trucks, getting muddy and playing with worms.  They also love purses and skirts that swirl when they twirl, their ‘babies’ and putting on ‘make ups’ (clear lip balm – don’t worry no toddlers in tiaras here).  This weekend to keep the Easter theme going I pushed my remedial sewing abilities a little further and entered the foray of children’s accessories. bunny purses to be exact.

I haven’t seen these done before on pinterest or any other blogs – so i posted a bit of a how to here for my fumbling steps to bunny bags but please let me know if you know of or have seen a better way!  Also a caveat – I don’t make patterns or measure (think very remedial) so all measurements below are estimates.  They are super fun little bags though, so if you have a little girl who might enjoy – you can put this together in about 30 minutes or less:

front

back

Here’s what you need:

about 1/2 M of two complimenting fun spring olours of cotton fabric, pre-washed and ironed, 1/2M of corresponding ribbon and some elastic

Here’s what you do:

1. cut out three identical bunny heads.  Two in one colour, and a third matching colour.  Ours are about 15 cm wide and 10 cm high, the ears are another 10 cm.

2. sew together two of the bunny heads in different patterns – fronts facing in – leave a small gap at bottom – flip them inside out, finish the stitching and iron flat.

3. cut off the ears of the third bunny, and fold over the flap about 1.5 cm sewing a straight line across so that you create a flap that you can thread the elastic through it later to make a pouch.

4. sew the third bunny onto the other, starting just below the left ear and going all the way to just below the right ear. do not stick over the openings in the flap you’ve made on either end, don’t stitch the top.

5. thread your elastic and a ribbon through the flap and pull the fabric so that it ‘scrunches’ up.  make sure your ribbon is not taught.  stitch over the ends and cut off any excess elastic.  It should look like this:

6. flip it back right side out and iron again. You can tie the ribbon around the ears to bring it all together.  You could also add a face to the bunny – though i like it plain.  The elastic along the back allows for precious things to be easily stowed and little hands to easily stretch into the bag to pull out any gems along the way.  I took a longer scrap of material in the corresponding pattern and flipped both sides in – laying a straight stitch down the middle in order to made a shoulder strap for the purse.  Attached on the inside and away we go.

This is the final look:

And this is one of our little babes – off to find dinosaurs to fill it with 🙂

Matthew is starting to understand a little bit about the real reason behind Easter, which I think is important, but the girls are still all about the bunnies and chocolate.  Regardless, we have a great two weeks of crafts and baking ahead of us as we prep for the weekend.  You might see a few more of these Easter posts as we bake and create our way to mid-April … hope I don’t bore you too much!