Today’s ornament is inspired by this adorable Zakka Owl by Moonstitches. She’s posted complete instructions, with pictures, for making these little guys.

Owls are nicely spooky, but we’re going to up the goth quotient by turning them into bats.

The owl instructions call for wool and linen, but I think these would be nice in rich fabrics like brocade or satin. For my mockup, I just used cotton.

I followed the basic instructions for sewing the owl, but I put the eyes on the other end and added ears and fangs.

The ears are rounded triangles of fabric. Fold the corners of the wide end to the middle, then tack with a couple of stitches. You can either sew the ears to the back of the body piece after it’s turned rightside out, or stitch them into the seam when you’re making the body. To do the former, tack the ears with a couple of stitches or attach them with fabric glue. To do the latter, lay them on the seam line so that the tops of the ears point toward the middle of the body and the bottoms are even with the edge of the fabric. When you turn the body rightside out, the ears will pop up.

I happened to have a couple of shiny beads laying around, so I used those for eyes. You can also use buttons as the owls do. I used one of my sewing machine’s preset decorative zig-zag stitches for the mouth, but you could also hand-stitch fangs with embroidery floss or omit them altogether. (Click thumbnail for larger.)

This bat took about ten minutes start to finish, and that included chasing down a toddler who’d run off with my measuring tape. You could create a whole bunch of these little guys very quickly and string them in a garland around the tree.

Previously:
Halloween Tree
Halloween Tree Part 2
Halloween Tree Part 3