A Quick Tutorial On How To Make A Fur Muff

Last Month, Gloria & Mike from In The Long Run Designs, invited me to participate in a special photo shoot called “Kit-Kat Club Portraits”.

I was very excited to be part of a really cool photography experiment and debated on what to wear. Many of the subjects wore gorgeous  silk gowns and summery 1780’s ensembles. Given it was the middle of Autumn and I wanted to mix it up a little bit with the selection, I got some advice from my friend Jennifer on what to wear: my Royal Artillery regimental riding habit (we’d figured that we’d be complimenting one another with my blue to her red habit). 

After getting everything ready, I realized that my habit needed something a little extra. So this is where my idea of making the fur muff comes into play. Not only does it work with the military habit, but also it works with every outfit of any period. 

Trying to make a muff on a shoestring budget was exactly easy, but I can tell you now, it’s VERY doable. The faux furs I priced at JoAnns’s were over $45 a yard and finding a vintage fur for under that price was next to impossible. My only option was getting the small strips of faux fur from the children’s doll making department in JoAnns for $3.75 each (coupons are your best friend btw at times like these). I had some silk taffeta already on hand, leftover from another project, and bought some poly-fiberfill at Wal-Mart and got to work.

Materials

24’’ silk Taffeta
26’’ Faux fur (once all 3 panels are sewn together)
52’’ cotton tape (for attaching the lining to the fur; should be 26’’ for each side)
Poly Fiber-fill

Construction 

 I sew the three fur panels together into one long strip using small back stitches, and then sewed the tapes to the outside edge (on the fur on the furry side) and then flipping the tape back to where it creates a hem line. 

Next, I took the taffeta and sewed it to the tape’s edges on three sides, folding the edges of the taffeta to give it a cleaner look. 

Then I stuffed it with fiberfill and flipped it over to hand-sew the ends together to make a tube. 

Finally, I camouflaged the small backstitches by fluffing the loose fur over the stitches. 

This was a very quick and easy project to do in such a very short time.