Fishing Set

I finally made it! This was supposed to be for Drake for Christmas and I ran out of time to finish it, so I thought that I would finish it for his birthday. Well, I totally forgot about it! So I decided that I would just do it, if only to get it off of my precious shelf space. And to use up some felt scraps. And the washers that I bought for it that were all over the place.

You will need:

• felt
• a dowel
• strong magnet
• string/yarn/something for the fishing line
• glue gun
• approx. 5 glue sticks
• scissors
• fish pattern (just google fish clip art)
• washers

I found a fish picture that wasn't too complicated and printed it an cut it out. I threw the paper away, so I measured the fish so you can see how big it is. About 3 inches......

by 6 inches.

I made 12 of these. In addition to the felt, I also used some flannel scraps. Cut 2 of each color that you are using.

Take one of the washers (I got these at Walmart. There were 2 options; these were they ones with the bigger hole in the middle).

Place the washer on the line of glue on one side of the fish and press lightly. Run another line of glue on top of the washer.

Take the other matching fish piece and carefully match up the tops and press together.

Lift up one side of the fish and continue gluing all the way around, leaving a small opening near the tail for stuffing. It really doesn't matter where you leave and opening, but I found it easier to leave it near the tail in order to get the stuffing in the tail easier.

Press lightly together and then pick it up and press the sides together rather hard. Don't worry about any glue that comes out. It will be trimmed off at the end.

Then take some of this (or whatever other batting you happen to have from other projects), and stuff the fish. I did not stuff the fish very full. There is probably only a handful of batting in them.

The hole stretches a little as you stuff. That is okay. Run a kine of glue just on the inside of the hole and pres closed.

Take your scissors and trim away any glue and fabric where it did not meet up right.

And all done with 1, 11 more to go!

This was a good example of the fabric not matching up.

This is how you know that your gluing and cutting skills need work:) There wasn't a fish that I did not need to trim up. And yes, I am in pjs. I started this at night and was too tired to finish, so I left it for the next day. Drake knew that I was making the fish and the first thing he said to me when he woke up was if I was going to finish the fish. So I crawled put of bed and finished his fish by 8:30 am.

I forgot to get pictures of the dowel, but here are the magnets I used. For the dowel, I just took a scrap rectangle piece of blue felt and glued it around an end of the dowel. For the fishing line, I used gray yarn and wrapped and glued the yarn around the other end. I then glued a magnet onto the yarn. It has since fallen off, so I glued 2 magnets together with the yarn in the middle. That didn't last either. So I knotted the yarn and placed the 2 magnets together. This has worked, so far:) I think that I need to go get some glue that is for metal and use that.

And all done! Now for one of the other gazzilion things on my to-make list.