elsie marley

Meet Olaf. He is the answer to the question: “Can this outfit be turned into a soft toy?”  The pants were mine a long time ago and the shirt I picked up at a thrift store for a different project.  I should have taken a picture actually wearing the outfit before I cut it all up, but there was a big, gaping hole in the shirt in a very conspicuous spot. I wasn’t sure if the pants would work, but my trusty little machine sewed through all those layers with just a little pushing on my part (and no swearing!).  All the pockets still work and I may whip up a little polka dotted toy for Olaf to put in a pocket, but he may be to serious for that.

I’m still working on the animals I was talking about a while back.  There has been more unnecessary law & order watching than sewing, but there is some progress. I’ve never actually drafted a pattern for one of my toys before and it’s pretty time consuming–especially when you have an anal retentive side.  I wanted the elephant to have a big head gusset that would extend down to his trunk and I couldn’t just whip this up.  This is my first attempt and though it looked the way I imagined, his trunk stuck out straight–Pinocchio style–when I stuffed him.  I made a few more and could have kept on making a little muslin menagerie, but I’m trying to make my toys less straight and narrow and more folky and improvised (strangely it’s the latter that needs a pattern).

So I cut into this amazing sparkley striped linen I got from namolio’s shop. I was going to make all the animals from thrifted outfits, and some still will be, but I was trying to cram too many ideas into one toy: stripes or patterned faces, moustached, thrifted outfit transformed into plush toy.  Besides this grey linen was a little wrinkly just like a naked elephant.

Here he is almost done.  He (ah! no name! any suggestions?) is sporting this fantastic fake moustache sent to my by Melinda (thank you again!).  And after seeing little elephante sporting this polka dot moustache, I don’t know if I should use a completely different print for the moustache or make it out of the denim I used for his pants or the grey linen again, or embroider a big fluffy one. I need feed back from all of you who have made it to the end of this post.

I always appreciate it when other plush artists post about their creative process. And though I am far from an artist and my process is quite random, I did make a few drawings for some animals I want to make. Since I saw this bear, I’ve been thinking about making a doll from a pair of pants. I think this elephant looks a little like an old timey strong man from the circus, except for his puny arms I guess (I’m not very good at limbs). But we’ll see how he turns out because I’m still new to pattern making. The idea of making toys from clothes is really exciting–not just using the fabric, but integrating the look of the shirt or dress or hell the whole outfit into the finished doll. It would be like the feature Domino magazine had where they took an outfit and turned it into a room, do they still do that? I always thought that was such a clever idea, but they never seemed to get it right somehow.

I’m rambling. Here is an actual artist who makes some mighty fine plush stuff: sien keegan.

I finished sewing a few things for the sale and I thought I’d pop in and show you. The bears are made from felted sweaters and printed cotton. I drew a simple bear then stitched, stuffed, and sewed on the features. Easy peasy. The denim and cashmere one is my favorite. I think it would be perfect for a little baby boy, but I have no idea if people will even buy these. I’m not much of a shopper (except for thrift stores and target) so I don’t really know what people buy or how much they pay for things. So how much would you pay for a bear like this ? They are a little under a foot tall (1 foot = 30 cm), machine washable, and super soft.

These are all the pillowcase dresses I’ve finished so far, but there are a few more cut and ready to go in my studio. I wasn’t going to make so many, but a showed a few to my friends and they were quite taken with them, so I whipped up some more. It doesn’t hurt that they are dead easy to make. And you can make them to fit girls from 6 months to 5 or 6 years old. For these I’m thinking 16 dollars a pop, what do you think? I haven’t sold stuff from a booth since my lemonade days, so I’m a little nervous about all of this. Tagging, pricing, talking up the things I’ve made. And this sale is the first of it’s kind so there could be a couple people there or hundreds. Nobody knows.

I have been absent from this little blog for a bit. We’ve had guests and will have many more in the coming weeks, so you’ll only hear from me on and off for a while. If you actually know me, well, just call instead of stalking me on the internet, silly.

There hasn’t been much time for making, but I did manage to try my hand at wet felting. I bought a big bag of lovely colored roving at a garage sale this summer and have been meaning to try it ever since. I thought it would be nice to sell a little bag of felted rocks along side my diggers. Wet felting is ridiculously easy, but wet felting on details was not so easy. A good friend told me that white wool doesn’t felt as easily (because of the bleach?) which is probably why I was swearing up a storm trying to put the tiny stripes on the rocks. But I haven’t given up. I really like the rocks especially in bright colors and I think I’m going to try to embroider some rock like details on them. Maybe even some moss!

this was a lot harder than it looks.  And even though it only needs a few buttons (wheels, headlights, tail lights) I can’t bring myself to finish it.  I thought I’d move on from diggers and try my hand at dump trucks.  The body of the truck wasn’t so bad–a lot of confusing parts, but it worked out okay.  But the actually dumping part (I have to learn me some technical terms if I’m going to keep making these things) was pretty damn frustrating.  I used timtex (well something like timtex but fusable–it was all they had–and I just fused both sides to cotton batting) and holy crap is that stuff hard to deal with.  Granted I probably shouldn’t be using it on something so small, but I couldn’t figure out how to make all the sides of the dumper sturdy.  It comes together just like a bag with a lining would, except if your bag has an extra thick layer of stiff as hell interfacing then it turns out that the inside is smaller than the outside and the lining you made has to be remade smaller (but whoops not that small, make it again).  Turning that sucker out was such a pain that I had to take a break half way through.  But now that I’m looking at it a day later (and complaining all over the place about it) I’m starting to like it again.  So really I have to rethink the pattern–any suggestions?  But I am happy about on thing: it dumps.

seahorseThis is a little seahorse ornament I made for a friend of mine. We watched a couple DVDs from the BBC production Planet Earth, which if you haven’t seen you better pretty soon. There are five discs and all of them are amazing–especially the caves, go rent the one about caves right now. This pygmy seahorse is from the shallow sea episode. There were two of these unbelievably small, red, polka dotted sea horses battling it out for a woman or territory (it’s always one of the two). It might have been the greatest battle of their lives, but to us it looked like they were bouncing off each other. Doink! Doink! Their polka dots didn’t make it any easier to take them seriously. I embroidered some random french knots all over and then did a sad blanket stitch around the whole thing. And there you have the smallest seahorse in the world ready to duke it out.

I had a thousand ideas for the holiday ornament swap–most were crap or required way too much work, some were pretty good but I never wrote them down, and the best ones I thought of were things I could of done if I had thought of them sooner. Ultimately, something had to be made and this is what did. Little stuffed christmas birds. They are two pieces sewn together, but the tail is sewn perpendicular to the other seam. Does that make sense? I wanted to make something stuffed, but didn’t want to sew up 10 stuffing holes (that is my least favorite part) so I left the tail open, stuffed the bird, and machine stitched the opening to look like tail feathers. Oh, this is not making sense, but whatever. Some look like christmas seals, some like christmas chickens, but at least one turned out the way I hoped. They just need their hangers (loops, string, you know) and an envelope and they can go in the very large pile that will hopefully get to the post office monday morning. If you are in group 44 (represent!) they will be on your tree soon.

Two christmas presents done. I think I have started everyone’s gift, but finished a sad few. The starting is the exciting part; the hemming and trimming thread and finding a #@*% box to put them in is not. I’m desperately trying to get at least most of the gifts that have to be sent in the mail by friday, but I’m sitting here eating gingerbread cookies (stolen from my daughter’s St. Nick gift–thanks mom!). These two are from Sock and Glove, the japanese craft book (in english) by Miyako Kanamori. I have a few japanese craft books (in japanese) and I can follow all the diagrams, but always feel like I’m missing something. And I am–to fold an opening closed these are the directions given in the book: “Fold the back of the head like a caramel-candy wrapper.” It makes perfect sense, but how bizarre. These were a lot of fun to make. There was quite a bit of hand sewing involved, but they came together pretty quickly. The horse is actually a zebra pattern–same thing, right? That’s what I thought, but I should have made the mane longer to make it a little more horse like (equine, I guess). Oh well, he still cuddly. It’s pretty fantastic that these two came from two pairs of socks. There is a great pattern in the book for a sweater made from a sock as well. If there’s time (ha!) maybe I’ll whip one up for the elephant. I found this soft toy glove book as well with patterns for squirrels and bananas!