CrossPost

This was originally posted as "Fear & Sewing in Las Vegas".   I, for the record, cannot for the life of me remember what The Pants Incident was :'D

This post has nothing at all to do with Vegas, though I will note I do know someone who lives in the same state =p

Ever come across a sewing pattern and just have this uncontrollable urge to try it out, even though sewing really isn’t your forte and the last time you did try to work from a pattern is referred to as The Pants Incident?  I do.  Did.  All of the above.  When it’s gift time, all bets are off.

The pattern in this case was an MLP:FiM-based one from DeviantART.

(if you use it be sure to read the instructions on the page she links to, with the pattern she adapted this from – otherwise you may get lost beyond lost if you’re a noob like me)

Christmas 2011.  Enter CRIPPLY MCSTARFISH.  Twitter people may or may not remember confusing remarks around that time period involving Cripply.  Well, here’s why I was making them:

my EYES.

Not too bad for a first-ever attempt.  Consider also I’m a cheapskate and printed the pattern out on letter-size paper, which leaves the final product around 12″ tall…in retrospect that thread was all wrong, though.  I used sheet felt for the whole thing, and it stood up to the abuse (resewing about three times, among other things) pretty well.  The legs are wired, too…and she smells a little like a leather jacket.  The eyes and the cutie mark are all cut from wee pieces of felt and glued on (the blue bits colored with fabric marker because I had no blue felt at the time and don’t even know what I was thinking there, tbh, not getting any.  Derp.), and the mane and tail are all cut from felt and sewn.

Other angles are HERE and HERE…some may recognize the Santa hat, a last-minute Q&D addition based on a desire to terrify the recipient :)

This particular pony’s name is Harmony Lily, and she belongs to Eria.

Fast forward to spring, 2012.  Turns out the boss is expecting his first kid.  Enter the pony pattern again, because he’s said it’s a girl and I know all little girls go through that Z0MG HARSES HGHBLGHARGLE phase.

Or at least we used to – nowadays it’s more like ~*HOMG ~WOLVES~ DESU*~, so idk.

THE RETURN OF CRIPPLY MCSTARFISH – and because I remembered to not delete all the photos off my phone, an example of where the nickname came from.

I should redo these someday.  Wee Donkey especially.

Three of them this time.  There would have been four, but I overstepped my bounds trying the Appaloosa, and it became a cat toy instead.  This time the eyes are sewn together/on.  The only things glued are the black one’s sleepy eyelids and his horseshoes (not visible in this picture)  Size and shape adjustments for the ears on the donkey were easy, and the unicorn’s horn is just a triangle shape.  The body fabric this time is fleece, which is more forgiving than felt in some ways, and the manes and tails (and the black one’s fuzzy feathers there) are Lion Brand ‘Homespun’ yarn.  I like Homespun, and discovered by accident when trimming a scarf with it that when it unravels naturally it looks a lot like hair.  Thinking back on it now, if I do this again I’ll have to find some other way to attach that yarn.  It was a BITCH to work with.  Each contains a cedar mothball with a drop of lavender oil on it.

The unicorn probably came out the best, looking at it from an MLP aesthetic point of view, but everyone else is tied, with two votes for the black one and his fuzzy feet, and two votes (and one attempted kidnapping) for the wee donkey.  In retrospect I think the next time I use this one I might combine the pattern parts so the head is attached from the start.  I am not good at attaching heads.  Not at all.

Secretly, Wee Donkey is my favorite too, and has been since I cut his pieces :B

I’m a sucker for punishment, I think we’re all agreed on that.  At least when it comes to some things.  With the workload RCFM has on me this year, I need some backup around to help me cope.  Enter the awesome BabyLondonStar (currently vanished from DA, does anyone know why?), and her plushie patterns.  You can still find some/all of the UFO catcher-style ones cached on Google – and thankfully the tutorial for the ‘sit’ one, which is what I was using, as well.  I think the hardest part of it for me was attaching the feet, to be honest.

Enter the challenge:  translating all nine scruffy, paunchy inches of this guy into a chubby chibi plush that wasn’t meant to be a stitchpunk in the first place.  I am really pleased with the results, y’all.

broken image, I know, I'm too lazy to dig him out and redo it in current year.

I’m jazzed about that hat.  It’s made from scraps of one of the ones I dissected in the course of Project Charlie!Hat in 2011.  It’s made in basically the same way as the original, except I had to piece it together so it has a more…rugged look to it.  It’s almost terminally rugged, come to think of it.  That is in fact an authentic piece of a deceased squirrel, there, and the patch is made the same way as the bigger one too.  Extra challenge there since it’s maybe 1/8 the size.  Oosh.

It is now canon that chibi-size Charlie has only two lace hooks.  I guess he grows into the other two as he gets bigger?  In this case they’re paper brads painted over with metallic black paint.  I initially had his eyes glued on in felt scraps, but those totally didn’t work out, so they’re painted on instead.  So is his mouth, though the (invisible in these photos, derp) eyebrows are stitched.  All felt construction this time, too!  I wound up elongating the arms on the pattern since he’s a stitchie, and making the optics from scratch, though I do have pattern parts for those now as well.  It shouldn’t be too hard to alter this one to be more just plain plush and less chibi, but that’s a plan that’ll have to wait for another day.