Fat Quarter Friday: Amish Puzzle Ball - Baby Toy

This week I made an Amish puzzle ball. They're fun to look at and make great baby toys! Ada is rather fascinated with hers. I looked here to find out how to make one, it's easy if a little time consuming. It's a great project to do while watching a movie.

Materials:
2 or 3 fat quarters depending on what style you like
Needle and corresponding thread

Step 1: Make a pattern from paper of an almond like shape roughly 2" wide and 4" long.

Cut out a total of 36 of these from your fat quarters. You can do three different fabrics, or two. I like the look of two better. If you're doing 2 fabrics cut 12 from one and 24 from the other, and if you're doing 3 fabrics, cut 12 from each.

Step 2: Take one of your sets of 12 and place them right sides together on one of the other sets of 12.

Step 3: Sew one side of each football, but don't go all the way to the ends, leave a 1/4" (see red dots).

Open up your football you just sewed like so, and

place your remaining set of 12 fabric face down on top.

Sew along the edge that only has two fabrics layered together, not the one with four. Remember to sew 1/4" away from the edge (see red dots).

Step 4: Adjust the football so that two more of the unsewn edges are together making sure that everything else is out of the way and sew 1/4" away from the edges (see red and blue dots). make sure to leave an opening so you can turn it. My openings were very small and hard to deal with, so I recommend leaving 1 1/2" - 2" opening.

Sew up your remaining edge staying 1/4" away from the edges (dots).

Step 5: Turn your football right side out. Use a crochet hook or something similar to make your ends poke out.

Stuff it so it's nice and full and sew it up. Repeat until you have 12.

Step 6: Take two of your shapes and sew two of their ends together. For the rest of this project, make sure you use several stitches to make sure your ball is sturdy and won't fall apart when it's been played with a bunch. (You can double your thread, so it's like doing two stitches at once and saves you time.)

Then sew another one on so you have three. Then sew the two far ends together to make a triangle (see black dots). Repeat until you have four triangles.

Step 7: We're now going to assemble the ball. Take two of your triangles and sew two of the points together like so.

Then sew on another one on the other side so you have three connected in a line. Arrange your triangles like so and now you're going to sew the two points markered with black dots together.

 You can now sew on the last triangle. You will sew it's three points on to the points marked in green in this picture.

You're done!

You can spin the pieces around so another color is on top.

This makes a great size toy for little hands. It works great as a ball, it rolls really well and is easy to catch, plus it tastes great!