Chicken run! (a giveaway/swap)

Avis, over at the Oh Sew Tempting blog, started a fun idea: a chicken run. Chicken pincushions will be criss-crossing their way around the globe. Who knew chickens were migratory birds?!

She made a chicken pincushion and drew numbers from an electronic hat, and I won it. The pincushion, Chooky (she has a new name as Miss Chicken was perfectly appropriate for northern England but far too formal for a chicken trying to make her way in the wild, slightly uncouth west of Australia), has just arrived. She is a little jetlagged and very hot, but her new friends are doing their best to make her feel at home.

Chooky meets some local chickens for the first time and tries to understand their strange accents.

When I put my name in the ‘hat’ to win the pincushion, I agreed to make another to give away.  I got a little carried away and made three. One is not quite fully grown, just a chick, really.

Three chickens: which would you choose?

If you would like to win one of the chicken pincushions I made, all you need to do is:

1. Agree to make one chicken and give it away on your blog within 4 weeks of receiving your prize, with your blog post linking back to the Oh Sew Tempting blog. (If you do not have a blog, you can still enter. Avis will host the giveaway of your hand-made chicken for you on her blog.)
2. Leave a comment below to say which chicken you would choose, what you would name it and which country it would be going to.

Entries are open until midnight Sunday 23 February (I will make allowances for whichever time zone you live in), and I will draw the winner on Tuesday 25 February.

To help Avis collect lots of chicken pincushion photos for her blog’s chicken run photo gallery, I am sharing the list of materials I used to make mine. I made them while Chooky was still in transit, but they turned out surprisingly similar.

You need:

• two 3½-inch log cabin squares (4 inches including seam allowances). I made mine using this foundation paper template
• one 4-inch square for the larger prairie-point tail (or smaller)
• one 3–3¼-inch square for the smaller prairie-point tail (or smaller)
• scraps of felt
• two small beads or bits of embroidery thread for eyes
• stuffing.

You only need a small amount of scrap fabric to make a chicken pincushion.

I machine sewed mine together by starting with the front seam, catching the beak as I sewed a ¼-inch seam. I then sewed the top seam, including the comb. I sewed the tail pieces in place (top, back) before sewing the tummy seam. This gave me more manoeuvrability when sewing the tail. Finally, I stuffed the chicken and hand sewed the seam underneath the tail to close it. Avis used an opening on the tummy seam, not under the tail, to stuff her chicken and made the tail a fraction smaller, just proving that there is more than one way to make a chicken. As Avis advised me, ‘Just use your imagination’.

For the smaller chicken, I scaled the template down to 75 per cent.

Please do not stuff any giveaway chickens with foodstuff or plant material as it may not be allowed into the country you are sending it to.

Please let Avis at Oh Sew Tempting know of any chickens you make so she can build a wonderful international chicken photo gallery.

Free-range chickens in the garden.

Have fun and good luck!

Carla