Paulette has a fun video for you today! She’s going to make this cute pattern called Puppy Pockets. Put your pet’s favorite treats inside the pockets, and let them find all the treats! We have yet to meet a dog who didn’t like it. This one’s pretty easy, so you may not need the pattern, but if you want the pieces and step-by-step instructions, it’s available here: Puppy Pockets Dog Treat Toy
Make sure you stay to the end, and see what our testing puppy thinks of this toy!
Video transcript:
Hi everyone I’m Paulette Morrissey from Tulip Square and this week’s video is puppy pockets. It’s one of our patterns, it’s number 609 puppy pockets and it’s little pockets that you can fill with treats. See there’s a pocket here and a pocket here, and more pockets here, and this is just a fun little thing you can make for your yourself, I mean, not yourself, your dog, your dogs. or any friends’ dogs or family dogs, it’s just a nice little thing to make. They’re quick and easy to make and they’re kind of fun. If you need the pattern it’s number 609, Puppy Pockets. But if you watch the video, you can see, that it’s not absolutely necessary to have the pattern, you can kind of wing it a little bit on your own. So let’s go to the sewing machine and get busy and make some puppy pockets.
Okay to start with for this project we’re going to need two pieces of fabric, and these are about maybe 16 inches wide and the width of the fabric, 42 inches or 40 inches, even a yard is plenty, and I just picked these two fabrics and I’ve got a piece of batting, cotton batting the same, the same width. So what you do, and you don’t need to see this real clear cuz it’s pretty basic, you lay out your first fabric right side down.
You aren’t going to be able to see this whole thing but it’s it’s not relevant. It’ll be okay.
Then you lay your piece of batting down on top of it, nice and smooth, and then you take your other fabric and lay it on top. I used a nice doggy fabric since these are for doggy treat pockets.
All right so you’ve got your three layers down just like this, and what you do is take this over to your sewing machine and do some really simple or basic quilting. You can do meandering, you can do just little lines, whatever you want, just something to kind of get all of the layers connected together nice. So I’m going to take it over to the sewing machine and do a little bit of that, and you can watch me do a few minutes of that. Before you start sewing all your layers together you might want to pin it in a few spots with safety pins or some long pins with big heads, just something to make sure you keep your layers carefully together. You don’t want them to come apart or accidentally get jumbled together so you’re sewing through six layers. But anyway I’m just going to do some really quick easy grid lines, and I like to use a walking foot for this just because it helps both layers go along smoothly together.
I’m also going to use a slightly bigger stitch, and these are just going to be straight up and down, and I’ll show you a few of them and then I’ll go finish it.
When you get to the bottom, you can either stop and turn the whole thing around and go back, or you can just cut it and go back to the top.
I’m just going to cut it and go back to the top. It’s a little too long to swing around.
I think I’m going to go about maybe 2 inches apart. I’m not going to measure this at all, I’m just going to kind of use this edge of my sewing machine as a guide, so whenever my next row goes right to there, and you’ll find some guide on your sewing machine if you want to be accurate but it really doesn’t matter because it’s just for dog toys.
So I’m going to go ahead and do all the way across, and then I’m going to come back and do a grid this way.
Now I’ve got all of the lines sewn this way, I’m just going to turn this and do just a few rows this way. And you don’t have to worry about catching the very ends of your edges of your fabric, because you’re going to be cutting these pieces out and you’re not going to get to the edges anyway.
Now you can either buy the pattern or you can do this without the pattern. If you want the pattern it’s pattern number 609 called Puppy Pockets. It’s a dog treat toy, so if you don’t want to buy the pattern just cut yourself out some big ovals. Now there’s two ways of doing this. First of all I’m going to cut these. You’ve got to cut your pattern pieces out.
I’m just going to cut these out real quick.
I don’t know where I got these crazy little kid scissors from, but they work, they cut paper.
Okay now you can do one of two things. You can pin these, tape these two together so it’s all in one piece, and I’m going to work on the lighter side of the fabric. It really doesn’t matter because you’re not going to see it once you’re done. You can pin this all together and you can pin this pattern piece down, and then cut this out and then pin it again, but what I’m just going to do is, I’m just going to draw around it, and then I will just move it and draw around it again.
I’m going to do the same thing with the pocket piece, only I’m going to need four pocket pieces, so I’m going to go one, and then two, and then two more on the next part, so I’m going to put one down here, and the pocket piece is a little bit shorter than half of this, see, it’s a little bit shorter. I’m going to put one about here.
Now you’re simply going to cut these out.
Ok, now we have two big ovals and four folded, four pockets, half ovals, kind of. All right so next we’re going to have to do some binding. What I like to do with binding is, whenever I’m working on a project, I put my extra binding in one of these book boxes, and I just keep saving it, so if I ever need it for something I’ve got a whole bunch of binding. And since I have an abundance of this black binding that I don’t know why I made this much for something, but I can use it for that. But this is just a little thing to show you that it’s a nice to keep, and then if you need a little binding for something I’ve got a couple boxes of them. So what you’re going to do to start is you’re going to take the four half pockets, half pieces, and just like your binding anything else, you’re going to stitch these pieces down on the back side of the pocket and then we’re going to fold it over and sew it to the right side. So I’m going to do one and show you and then I’ll do all of them. Get them done. I’m going to use white thread just so it’s more visible for you to see. Normally on a piece of black binding I use black, black thread.
Now we just turn these pieces to the right side, and stitch them down, and like I said you could use black thread for this, but you’re not going to see the black thread so I’m not going to do it. But you can see how I’ve got them all sewn down. Now we’re just going to turn them to the right side and finish off this edge. You could use a zigzag stitch here too, that would work. So we’ve got four pockets with their binding on, that’s the insides of your pockets, unless you like that to be the outside that’s okay too. Okay now next, if you don’t have long enough binding, you’re going to need a piece of binding long enough to go all the way around the outside edge of this whole piece. Then what we’re going to do, is we’re going to pin a puppy pocket here, put this over here so you can see what we’re doing, whoops, don’t want them upside down, we’re going to pin a puppy pocket up here, and we’re going to put a pocket down here, so there’s a nice space in between them.
Okay so you pin that down, and then you’re going to take your binding, and if you don’t have any binding long enough to go all the way around, and for this one I think you need about 40 inches, stitch some binding together enough so that it will fit. I’m going to start right down here, get my other half out of the way, and I’m just going to do the same thing with any binding. I’m just going to sew around the edge with a quarter inch seam.
I am my own cameraman here so bear with me. It gets a little thick when you’re going right over all of this binding, and so take your time.
I left a good tail at the beginning so I can work with that later.
Just take your time going around the edges, the corners.
Which actually aren’t corners, they’re curves. When I get to the spot where I’m crossing the binding I like to back tack.
Once I get past this last curve, come down to where it’s straight here, then I’m going to get ready to sew the two ends together. I’m going to cut that off, let me straighten this up just a little bit more. All right now I’m going to connect the two ends of the binding. So what I’m going to do, is in this gap here, I want to work right about in the middle of it. The middle of this gap is right about here, so I’m going to take this piece and I’m going to cut it at about the middle of that gap opening, and this other piece I’m going to bring it over and I’m going to cut it so its two ends overlap by about a half an inch. Let’s see right about there I think that should work.
So these two pieces overlap by about a half an inch, and now I’m just going to open up both of those, I’m going to kind of, whoops! Oops oops oops, here we go, and open them up.
Then I’m going to kind of fold the whole thing in half, so that I can flatten these two together, and I’m just going to sew across the end.
You can pin this if it makes it easier, or you can just have a really good grip on it.
Try to use a quarter inch seam here just so you’ve got it all accurate.
That was a very generous quarter inch seam but that’s okay. Now I’m going to just finger press this little seam open, like so, and then flatten it back down along its original line, and then I can finish this outside seam.
I’m going to overlap where I stopped sewing a little bit.
You can take these pins out. Now you can see I’ve got the binding sewn all the way around, and then what you’re going to do is just turn it to the right side, fold it over, and stitch it down again.
This time I’m going to use a zigzag stitch so you can see how that works.
and your doggies won’t care which you use.
take your time around the curves, but the fabric will automatically curve nicely right around here, so it’s not a problem. You can see it’s curving willingly.
I just overlapped a few stitches at the end just to keep it secure.
and then you’ve got one half of it done. It’s all stitched together on the inside and it’s got all kinds of crazy zigzag lines, but doggies don’t care. So zigzag is a little more visible, see you’ve got two pockets here, and now we’re going to make one more just like this, and then we’ll put them together. So now that you’ve got both pieces done like this. So now what you do is, you take the pop the pieces, and I’m going to alternate upside-downness, and you put them all together, pockets facing in, all the pockets together. So the pockets are on the inside, and just kind of line this up kind of nicely. And then right in this gap in the middle, where you can see where you have nothing right in here, in this space, I’m going to do a couple of rows of stitching.
Swing it around and go right back across that same seam.
Then I’m going to make another one, just about a quarter or a half an inch away.
And your puppy pockets are all finished. You’ve got four pockets on the inside, two on this side and two on this side, and this is all closed up when you have it like this, it’s like a little wallet kind of a thing.
This is a pretty fun pattern to make. It’s pretty quick and easy, you don’t have to use your best sewing skills for this. It’s a good project to practice free motion quilting, or just kind of grid stitching, which you can see wasn’t real even but my dogs don’t care. And this is perfect for all you want to keep your dogs busy with something, fill these little pockets with some goodies. We like freeze-dried liver treats in here because they aren’t messy, they don’t stick or anything, and the dogs can get them out pretty easy. It takes them awhile to figure out all these different flappy layers, so it’s kind of fun. This is also a nice thing to give as a gift, if you know somebody who’s got a new dog and you’re going to go visit them or anything, get them one of these, make them one of these, and and bring along a little bag of treats to go with it, and they’ll have fun with it. So I hope you enjoyed this little video, a little switch from making quilted things for ourselves and our houses, this is for our pets.
So I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did please hit the like button, and the Subscribe button, and remember it’s pattern number 609 Puppy Pockets, if you need to use the pattern it’s got two different sizes in it, pretty straightforward but it’s got all the step by step instructions if you if that helps you. So go have some, do some sewing, and have a good day, and we’ll see you next week.