Our newest sewing pattern is Tabitha Rabbit, a cuddly felt bunny with removable dress, jacket and shoes. Tabitha is 16 inches high including her floppy ears!

She wears a sleeveless floral dress with a matching felt jacket and shoes. I had so much fun making her and her clothes, and have plans for at least two more dolls and lots more outfits and accessories, so you can make many variations and create a wardrobe for them to share!

The process of creating templates and instructions for Tabitha and her clothes was quite a long one –  a bigger, more three-dimensional toy with separate clothes is a lot more complicated than a small ornament!

Creating the head and body patterns involved a combination of drawing shapes and testing them with fabric, and making parts out of fabric then deconstructing them to create templates. There was a lot of trial and error, then once I was happy with the design I made up rabbits in a few different felt colours to decide which to use for the photos. (You can use any colour you like of course!)

I’d had the cotton print for her dress and the green felt for her jacket in mind from the start. I chose that outfit for the brown rabbit and made a second one in blue and white for the grey rabbit. 

Next I made another Tabitha in order to take step by step photos for the instructions, measured all the felt and fabrics used for the materials list in the pattern, adapted my general sewing instructions for toymaking, and wrote the main instructions for the project.

At this stage with all our patterns my partner George uses tech magic to make my hand drawn templates into documents, puts all my instructions together as a pdf file, and creates the cover picture.