Zakka Style Sew Along – An Elephant Never Forgets

Hey all! It’s finally my day in the blog hop for the Zakka Style Sew Along. I hope you have been playing along or at least admiring the projects of those who are. It’s been a lot of fun to see what people are making.

I’m going to share with you the next project in the book, the Elephant Bookmark, aptly titled “An Elephant Never Forgets”. I was feeling particularly whimsical on the day when I picked this out as my project. I think it was around the time I was working on that owl backpack 😉

The original design was made in a floral printed Linen. But I wanted to see what the bookmark looked like with a simpler fabric. So I used Robert Kaufman’s Essex Linen in Dusty Blue (a fabulous fabric by the way!). It’s a lovely blue grey color that just reminded me a bit of elephants. I’m literal that way. 😉

I also had the pleasure of using Cosmo Embroidery Floss for the first time on this project. I’m pretty new to the world of embroidery floss and I’ll admit that I was not expecting anything too different when I got the floss. But I’m not kidding when I say that I LOVE it. It gives such a beautiful finish. I weirdly just wanted to cover the elephants in a bunch of floss! lol Aren’t you glad I resisted the urge? Actually I did try, but it looked pretty bad so I pulled it out right away. It kind of looked like the elephants had the chickenpox. Not pretty.

I made this sweet gal first. I think my favorite part is her pretty bow. You can’t add too much to these guys to decorate them because they are bookmarks aka they need to stay pretty flat. So you only decorate one side and that cute head.

I got all fancy on the next one 😉 and decided to add some extra fabric and ribbon to dress him up. I like how this guy turned out. The orange is a nice contrast to the linen and scale of the print works well. I just added the fabric before I sewed the pieces together. Worked like a charm.

Tips and Tricks:

Well one of the things I loved about the design of this pattern is that you trace the image onto the fabric but you don’t cut it out until after you have sewn the two pieces together. That seemed genius to me. I fully expected to trace the elephant template onto two pieces of fabric, cut them out and then try to carefully piece them together. Her method is sooo much more forgiving. Just sew on the traced lines on one piece of fabric and then trim the fabric away afterwards!

Also, you have noticed that this bookmark is fairly tiny and has some fiddly bits like the feet and the trunk. They are as annoying to turn right side out as you might imagine. Oh and that tiny ear. I had all of pieces lined with interfacing and that was just NOT helping me turn the pieces right side out. My point turning tool kept getting caught in the interfacing and had fusible adhesive on it. I ended up using some small scissors to push my points out and that seemed to work better for whatever reason.

All in all, it’s a cute little design that would be a sweet gift for a younger person in your life. Who doesn’t need a bookmark?!