How To Add Safety Eyes to Fabric with Tapered Tailor’s Awl

I’m Marie from Underground Crafter and I’m excited to be closing out Clover’s celebration of National Sewing Month by sharing how to add safety eyes to fabric with the Tapered Tailor’s Awl.

I love to sew softies and I use safety eyes and noses to give each of my creations its own unique personality. Adding safety eyes and noses to fabric can be challenging. The tips on the back of safety eyes are not sharp enough to push through fabric, and using scissors, embroidery snips, or other cutting tools can start your fabric unraveling or create an opening for stuffing to come through. I wanted my Sew a Sloth pillow pal to have big safety eyes and a craft nose in a smaller size, so I knew I had to find a solution.

It turns out that the Tapered Tailor’s Awl allows you to create a hole of just the right size. You can use the tapered point to make the hole as small or as large as you need so that you can insert a wide array of safety eyes or noses into your next softie project.

For the Sloth, I used 24 mm eyes but the nose is just 18 mm. On some of my other softie projects, I’ve used eyes as small as 6 mm! Head over to Underground Crafter to check out my quick tutorial video for how to add safety eyes to fabric in the free sewing pattern for the Sloth softie pillow pal. If you make a Sew a Sloth, I’d love to see your version. Tag me as @ucrafter on Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter, or as Underground Crafter on Facebook.

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