After completing my latest quilted hearth stockings project, I still had quite a few quilting strips leftover and a strong urge to continue quilting them together. With gifting-time fast approaching, I decided that my quilting strips would make great doggie bandanas for Tovi and some of her closest friends.
Tovi has a rich social life, and many puppy friends, but I didn’t have enough fabric to make a bandana for all of her dog buds, and I apologize if anyone feels left out. Below, Tovi models her new holiday outfit.
I added bells to the bandana points because all of the great yuletide demons wear bells. The combination of bells and shackles serve both as a symbol of the demons’ imprisonment by the angles of the season, and as an early warning of their immanent arrival. When the pagan monsters lost their divine status, the Saints employed them to do the dirty disciplinary work of kidnapping or lashing the bad children.
That’s likely one of the origins of the bells on Santa’s sleigh. A warning of his approach and an allusion to darker beasts tamed. Fitting that our mischievous dogs also spend much of their existence shackled to us, their human masters…so I had to add bells to my little beast.
