Mini Chicken Pouch

It’s time to launch our Free Taster Weekend for The Thread House Academy and this year my tutorial will be this mini chicken pouch! Read on to find out why I will NOT be writing a pattern for it.

I first made one of these little triangle pouches during a Golden Bobbins (my local sewing group) sewing day in the Autumn. One of our members, Cat, led the session having made one already using one of the many free tutorials available on YouTube. I’m not sure of the original provenance of this pattern but I think it’s probably Japanese. The wonderful artist Bookhou has a very popular free tutorial where she creates a boro type of fabric to make a super cute pouch.

I really enjoyed stitching my original triangle pouch but couldn’t help thinking how much the shape reminded me of a felt decoration I used to make either as a robin or a chicken.

You can see the triangle shape resemblance in these images . I still have a blog tutorial for it here which dates from 2011! The following year I did this as my first ever live demo at the Country Living Fair in Glasgow. I was absolutely terrified on the first day but by the fourth and last day I was loving it! You can read about this here. For that demo I also made a chicken version to show folks how to make an Easter version. Thank goodness for my blog archive so I can find all these dates and images.

With all this in mind I had a little play around and made the first chicken version.  I loved it immediately and knew it would be the perfect tutorial subject for our annual Free Taster Weekend.  

We use this weekend to launch and promote our next year’s Thread House Academy classes and so students can ‘try before they buy’.

I showed this little fella to Karen and Lynne and they gave me the thumbs up.

As the taster weekend wasn’t happening until early April I sat on the chicken pouch (not literally, I don’t want to squash him!) as I didn’t want to share too soon and have everyone clamouring for a pattern/tutorial before we were ready to announce anything. 

This gave me some time to try a bird version (on the right, though someone said it looked more like a turtle!) which led to a robin (below). Since then I have made another chicken version (left), finessing the pattern a little each time. 

I really wanted to share the robin before Xmas so in November I revealed the mini chicken pouch with a reel on Instagram.  It went down very well! A few weeks later I shared the robin to a similarly positive response.

This of course is wonderful. Instagram is such a great place to try stuff out, you can get instant market research results. As I predicted, this little pouch was going to be popular and would hopefully encourage lots of signups to our taster weekend when it came around.

However there is a price to pay for popularity I have now discovered. I am on the radar of a particular scammer who has already stolen my Dream Bird/Flower patterns countless times. These people (or just one person perhaps?) constantly create new websites so when I get the stolen product pages taken down they just pop up again on a new cloned site.

They have been stealing my reels and images to use to make adverts that link to the stolen patterns on Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest. Meta will do absolutely nothing about this despite countless complaints. Pinterest will take action quickly and take them down and I am very grateful for that (so of course the scammers mainly use Facebook).

But I wasn’t expecting anything to happen with these chicken/robin pouches as I haven’t even written a pattern or instructions for anyone to steal. Oh how wrong I was…

…the same people took my images from Instagram and photoshopped them into a product for a ‘kit’, complete with template and full tutorial. They stole my robin reel and used it on Facebook and Instagram to feed traffic to the product.

It took me about 3 weeks to get that page taken down (while simultaneously fighting a new Dream Bird ‘kit’ from another of their websites with more stolen reels!). In the meantime many people fell for this scam. I have now heard from some of them. All they received is a useless template with no instructions. Who knows whether the template works. I haven’t even properly created my own template for this yet so I don’t know how it could!

As you can imagine all this has really been getting me down and it has made me reluctant to share anything that I know will be popular. Why should I create all this great content for some criminal to use it to scam people?! It has also made me reluctant to release anymore new PDF patterns.

So that’s the main reason I am NOT writing a pattern for these little triangle bird pouches, because it will just get stolen by these criminals! The other reason is that I do not feel comfortable charging money for a pattern that has mostly been designed by someone else and that is available for free elsewhere. After all I have just added beak, wings and eyes to this item which is hardly groundbreaking.

So instead this will be a FREE tutorial. And I am very happy to provide this for free. I benefitted from the original free tutorials so this is just paying it forward.

For now it will only be available as part of our Taster weekend. You can sign up for FREE right now by clicking here.

The Free Taster Weekend is on the 5th and 6th April. All classes are pre-recorded and will be available to watch throughout the whole weekend as many times as you like!

And it’s not just my chicken pouch, we each have a fantastic project to share:

Lynne will be taking you step by step through tiny FPP to create this stunning Origami Crane Mini Quilt and Karen is sharing her modern take on the ancient craft of couching with these cute coasters.

And what about those sweet little felt beads I’ve been making for all these pouches as an extra handmade touch? Well I will have more news on these next week!

Perhaps one day I will offer the mini chicken pouch as a free tutorial somewhere else but do you really want to wait that long?? Of course not! So I will ‘see you’ at the Taster Weekend in April!