My eldest son is obsessed with “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”, at barely two he can recite the entire thing from memory, from Eric Carle’s awesome fabric line we now have cushions, aprons and even some pants with his artwork on. So now that he can sleep on it, cook in it and wear it, what comes next? He needs to cuddle it!

Please be aware that this certainly is a tutorial, not a pattern. There are no exacts here, just scale everything to look right to you (my caterpillar is about 15 inches across) I really wanted to emulate Eric Carle’s less than perfect style in creating his collages, this is not meant to be precise, it’s meant to make your children, or your own inner child smile and think of the Caterpillar that took a whole week to fill himself up

You will need:

• Cotton – green and red
• Felt – black, green and yellow
• One brown pipecleaner – this is for the antennae, if you’re giving this to a younger baby I would recommend making antennae out of felt instead of the pipecleaners, because of the sharp ends.
• Green embroidery floss

Basic Shapes

1. Cut out the above shapes. The body and head in cotton and the feet and eye components in felt.
2. Sew each side of the head to each side of the body.
3. Assemble like so. This is where I have to apologise for the terrible image, I have lost my Photoshop installation discs so my artwork is somewhat sub-par I hope it is still understandable. Stitch all the way around, leaving a gap of a couple of inches to stuff and taking time to reinforce at the points shown
4. Turn the right side out and stuff!.
5. Sew up your stuffing hole with a blind stitch.
6. Thread your needle with a length of green embroidery floss, all six strands, insert the needle underneath where the green meets the red (throat? who knows!?). Make a small stitch to secure it, bring your needle right up to the top of the body, insert it into the top seam line, pull as tight as you can to gather the body and tie a small neat knot. Take the thread back down to the underside, put your needle into the body where the thread began and then exit the body about and inch further along the seam line. Do the same thing again, take it to the top, neat knot, back to the bottom and then begin the next segment an inch away. It’s a pain to explain, but I promise once you begin you will get it! Remember to gather as much as you can as you go, the knot in the top seam stops the thread from easing too much, but there will still be a little. As I know my son is a little rough with his toys I also dabbed some glue on the starting and finishing knots just to make sure they didn’t come loose.
7. Sew the pupils to the eyes and then the eyes to the body, bend your pipecleaners however you wish and tadaa you have one caterpillar ready to go and eat piles of fruit in numerical order!

To really finish it off you could also make food for him to eat using the border fabric from the Andover range, package it up with a copy of the book and you’re set for a baby shower present!