Craft corner

  • By Jonetta Rose Coffin / Special to The Herald
  • Saturday, March 25, 2006 9:00pm
  • LifeGo-See-Do

No need to fret if your crystal decanter is packed away in the attic. Dress up your Easter table with our bunny-shaped wine bottle covers.

While browsing through a Marysville gift shop recently, we saw some wooden table decorations in the shape of tall, slender rabbits with long ears, and our potential craft alarm went off at once.

The stylish bunnies were the perfect shape for tall, slim wine bottles; could be easily adapted to fit other bottles (soft drink, juice, champagne, etc.) as well; and would make a festive addition to an Easter table or buffet.

When working with a simple, clean design, the possibilities for using different fabrics and embellishments are endless. For example, the bunnies could be made from quilted fabric, denim or any stiff fabric – even faux fur.

What you need

*Pattern

* Felt or fabric of choice

* Rotary cutter or scissors

* Cutting mat (if using rotary cutter)

* Tapestry needle and embroidery floss or sewing machine

* Feathers, yarn or other embellishments

* Quick-dry tacky glue

* Crochet hook

We narrowed our choices down to felt or fleece so that we wouldn’t have to drag out the sewing machine to finish the seams. Since we had a stash of felt at home, we decided to go with the crafting staple for our first attempt.

To make a pattern, we sketched out the bunny shape on a piece of newspaper, cut it out, then wrapped it around a wine bottle to adjust for size. We purposely cut the bunny on the large side the first time so that we could pare it down for our actual pattern.

When making your pattern, you’ll want the sides to go about -inch over the mid-point around the bottle. This will give you room to make -inch side seams and a little room to spare without being too big.

When you’ve adjusted your bunny shape to the right size – and it’s a good idea to make a pattern for each bottle individually as they do tend to vary slightly – fold the paper bunny in half and draw one half of the pattern onto a folded piece of tissue or newspaper, with the fold down the center, and cut out a finished pattern so that both sides will be identical.

One thing we didn’t take into consideration before making our pattern was that the felt we had on hand was not long enough cut the bunny in one piece, so we had to piece a top and bottom together for each side of the bunny.

This was not a real problem, though, as we covered the piece line with yarn on one bunny and a strip of feather boa for the other.

We chose a pink and purple combination for one of our bunnies, making the top of the bunny pink and the bottom purple; and a sparkly black and white combo for our second bunny, making one side black and the other white.

Using a tapestry needle and running stitch, we sewed the top and bottom pieces of each bunny together with embroidery floss.

With the same needle and floss, but using a blanket stitch, we stitched the front and back sides of each bunny together.

To cover the piece line on our pink and purple bunny, we used a length of lavender feather boa stitched in place with a regular needle and sewing thread. We also added a band of boa around the bottom and glued some tiny silk flowers to mask the points where the boa strips were joined together.

The sparkly gold trim used on our black and white bunny was a bit trickier: we had to do a bit of last-minute crocheting.

We had some gold eyelash yarn that we wanted to use as embellishment, but after trying several methods of adding it to the bunny, we realized we’d have to get out the crochet hook.

Using a small crochet hook, we slip stitched in each running stitch space around the bunny, joined to the first slip stitch, then did a 3-chain/single crochet pattern in each slip stitch around.

Of course, you can use purchased trim so that you don’t have to do the crocheting, but we wanted to go with what we had on hand for this project.

You can add faces to your bunnies if desired: some googly eyes and a toothy smile on a bunny covering a soft drink bottle will add a touch of whimsy to the kids’ table. And be sure to add a white pompom to the kiddy bunny’s behind to make a tail.

We experimented with several faces for our covers, but opted for simplicity. We tried eyelashes, heart-shaped noses, button eyes and a couple of embroidered designs, but nothing quite worked for us.

For our black and white bunny, we had planned to put a sleeping face on the black side and a wide-awake face on the white side. We still think this is a good idea, but we just weren’t happy with any of the faces we tried out.

Play around with different facial ideas if you wish, but be sure to try them out on a separate piece of fabric first – especially if you use felt or solid colors.

Many printed fabrics will not show needle marks if you decide to remove the face once you’ve seen it on the bunny, but felt and solids can be terribly unforgiving and will show every poke and stitch mark.

Contact Jonetta Coffin at jrocoffin@aol.com.

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