While surfing some of my favourite blogs and craft websites I stumbled upon quite a few different ideas for making hot water bottle covers.
While some were extremely cute, none of them were really what I was looking for. I decided that I would make a hot water bottle cover but I had no idea what type of cover I would make. Well, I came up with the most amazing (in my humble opinion) idea ever!
A Matryoshka/Babushka water bottle cover! Golden!
So here we have my old sad red water bottle. I don't know who designs these things but they sure don't have a whole lot of style on their own.
I set out to draw a rough stacking doll shape that would fit the bottle with a seam allowance.
Once the pattern was drawn and cut I made sure it was symmetrical.
Next I drew my stacking doll and all of the details that I wanted to include on the cover. Since she is obviously a very stylish Babushka I made sure to draw on eyelashes.
I made individual pattern pieces for all of the parts adding seam allowances as needed. The back could have been a solid fabric but I decided that I wanted to keep the cover as much like a doll as possible. Thus her outfit had to continue onto the back - no cheaping out! The smaller pieces/face and hair are all out of felt as the edges can be left raw, just topstitched and they won't fray.
All of the main body pieces were sewn together first. I topstiched down all of the seams to keep the cover looking flat once it is in use. The face and hair I topstitched into place. As you can see I had to do two layers at the bottom. Turns out the burgundy fabric which matched so perfectly was chiffon. Boohoo. So I used a white cotton underneath which ended up making the colour appear more vibrant. Yippee!
Using fusible glue I secured the face pieces in place before topstitching them down. I think this is the best way to do this type of small work as a pin can shift, especially when it is removed to stay out of the needles way. I used it for the ties on her shawl as well.
The eyelashes, nose and corners of her mouth I drew on with thread. Very cute looking so far!
This is officially my least favourite part of this whole project. Originally I was going to use snaps to close the bottom but after some consideration I decided I would rather put in a zipper. Too bad the bottom of the doll is curved and not straight. As you can see from the picture I used quite a few pins to ensure that the zipper did not go out of place. The whole zipper thing was a pain, but in the end the lining matches great, the colour of the zipper matches great and I think it was a better choice than the snaps would have been.
The finished product! I am VERY happy with how this turned out. She looks a little lumpy as I already put a water bottle inside her - I just couldn't wait! Very cute and cuddly, much better than a plain old red water bottle for sure.
And here you can see the zippered bottom which opens to allow the water bottle in/out. The lining is a dark blue colour. I was going to use white but then thought a darker colour would be better as it would add more interest, and it certainly does! I am pretty excited to be able to use this in the upcoming chilly months of January and February.
Anyways, it is getting REALLY close to Christmas and I will be heading to my parents for the holidays. I may or may not be posting for a while, although as soon as everyone opens their Christmas presents I plan on posting those for everyone else to see what I was up to this last while.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
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