It’s a bed. For a tiny dog.

I know a lot of folks love animals, adore their pets like they are their children. I’m not one of them.

I tolerate animals at best and only on rare occasions enjoy being in the same room as a dog or cat. So, letting my daughter get a pet dog was a huuuuuge deal for me and one that I argued against/ignored/pshawed for months, if not years.

Finally, though, in December my sister needed to get rid of her little dog and we finally had a place that would be suitable for a pet. I asked her if we could give it a try, see if my daughter could manage it.

Four months later, Cody hasn’t exactly found a warm place in my heart, but I find him cute periodically and I’ll even clean up after him when I have to. (Still, I’m glad he belongs to her!) And all these months later, I finally got around to making what I’d promised to make when he first came into our house… a dog bed.

I used a pattern from the One Yard Wonders book from Storey Publishing. It takes just a yard of fabric and I used scraps for mine. I had made a coat out of the fancy-schmancy grandma fabric, and the bottom was a fabric I’d bought to re-upholster a couch that has long since found a new home.

Cody wasn’t so terribly fond of it at first, and I wasn’t sure he was really gonna fit! Give him a week or two and he is loving it.

The construction of it was super easy (took me an hour and a half from finding fabric to tossing it onto the floor for the dog to perch himself in). A bunch of trapezoids stitched together, with squares at top and bottom. She explains the sewing technique clearly and you can see my corners turned out pretty darn nice after all.

And because I wanted it to be washable (dog=dirty), I decided to skip filling it with traditional polyester stuffing and got clever with the big bag o’ mismatched socks. Oh yes, I stuffed it full of socks that had no match or had gotten too small or whatever reason they’d found their way into that bag. Now they are in the dog bed which has two perks: machine-washable/dry-able bed and no more bag o’ mismatched socks!

And with a little encouragement from my work buddy Crissy, I stitched a tiny ribbon with my initials: TLC. Next time I’ll try to center it. Duh.