Several weeks ago our September 2011 Disney Family Fun magazine came in the mail.

And sat somewhere.  Like in a basket.

Which wasn’t on purpose.  I just couldn’t gather 30 minutes together to look through the thing.

Until Wednesday night when I was willingly confined to a chair while someone cut my hair and turned it brown again.

I brought my magazine.

Which did more than bide time with me– it planted the inspiration to try the No Sew Lion craft on page 10.  With my kids.

Here’s what Thursday afternoon looked like.

The directions said we had to cut out two 20 inch fleece circles from maroon and yellow fleece.

Which I took to mean I shouldn’t free-scissor the thing and hope it was twenty inches, so I made a pattern.

Technical.  Ahem.

And then I cut the thing out.

About this time I mentioned to my kids the idea of making pillows.

Which promptly made them start pinging off the walls, the couch and the back door while asking 85 questions I didn’t know the answers to.

Next time…I’ll get everything together first.

Here’s what we needed: Different colored fleece, sewing scissors, sewing pins, a 20″ pattern, polyester fiberfill, and an extra day’s worth of patience.

The lion on that page right there.  That’s what we’re aiming for.

There wasn’t a lot my kids could do just yet except pick out their fleece colors and hand me the sewing pins.

My daughter went the semi-classic lion route and chose orange and yellow fleece.

And my son chose pink and black.

His lion–were we to make it that far–would be unique.  Or sunburned.

Okay…so here are our circles.

They’ve got one more prep stage.

All the way around the circles we’ve got to make a 3 inch-long fringe–about an inch wide.

Until we’ve got a sunshine.

Now we’ve got to tie each fringe pair–a yellow and an orange fleece strip–into knots.

Same as if we were making a no-sew baby blanket.  Just knots all the way around.

My daughter loved this part.  She tied knots around hers and then tugged her brother’s fleece from my hands and volunteered to finish his.

Hallelujah.

Here are both ‘lions’ mostly knotted.  We’ve left about a five-inch gap in each to stuff them with the fiberfill.

Now stuffing his fleece was something my son could do.  Easy. Messy. Lumpy.

Here’s my daughter stuffing hers.

And here are both pillows–stuffed and knotted.  We finished knotting the rest of the fringe after we stuffed ‘em.

Now…what turns the pillow into a lion or anything else is an assumed amount of creativity.

Which means you might not end up with a lion.

Gasp.

But rather Senor Sol.

Or his more-contented cousin.

But eventually…if you stick with it long enough, as in, you cut and re-cut fleece pieces and finally smear ‘em all with glue, you end up with something that–sort of somehow–resembles a lion.