Josh -- A tutorial

You've seen me stitch the angel and mouse ornaments for my friend's daughters.  They became big sisters this spring when this little guy arrived:

Rachel and I narrowed his ornament field down to the Old MacDonald set or miscellaneous boys.  I decided that the boys would be more fun to do as he got older and developed interests and hobbies.  I kept looking at patterns and just kept coming back to Josh -- the baby in the crib.  Then, I literally spent several days contemplating how I wanted to engineer this one.  Here's the pattern:

You can see that Carolyn's vision was for each individual bar to be cut out.  I don't do my ornaments exactly like she did because I stitch everything.  Every time I looked at this pattern, I considered a different way to do it.  I finally decided that I didn't want to spend a month stitching this and wanted it to be as simple as possible, while still having some dimension.  The first thing I did was print an extra copy of the pattern and cut out a new paper piece where the crib was just one piece.  I cut two -- one with the spaces between the bars cut out for the front, and one solid piece for the back.

Next, I started stitching the baby to the mattress and background.  First, I stitched everything that would be along the bottom on the mattress.

Next, I took that whole piece and laid it on top of the white background.  I stitched everything down along the top edge.  I went from the right side of the mattress, up over the head, down the top of the baby's pajamas, and back to the left side of the mattress.  Before I did the details like the button and the face, I turned the piece over and cut away the excess white felt to reduce the amount of bulk:

From there, I attached that piece to the back of my crib front piece.  Then the crib got stitched together front to back as two pieces.  I didn't stuff this one super tightly because I wanted it to be a little flatter.  I did the wheels and teddy bear as separate pieces and glued them on to give the ornament some dimension.  As I told Ouida, I'll 'fess up to taking the coward's way out on this one . . . but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!