The king has left the building...but er, not yet...

So far I've had mostly requests for plushies of people who are basically fictional, even if they are sometimes played by live actors. This was a new thing for me to have a real person, if one who is deceased. It was also difficult to know what would make him really distinctive as the person. The white suit seemed the most obvious choice but actually there are several different white outfits worn by Elvis at different occasions, one of which was literally a white suit. This is the picture that appealed to me from a design point of view.

So then I did a brief sketch.

When I finally came to make it thought I started to dither about how sparkly to make it. So I asked the requestor (it is an anniversary present for her husband) and she liked the idea of sparkles, as did some of my friends.

So I just got to it. The main technical difficulty was that for both hair and clothes I was actually combining two layers of fabric. The sparkly silver was too transparent and stretchy to be stuffed, so I had to sew the two layers together before I could do anything else. The same went for the hair as I had one fabric the right opacity but very slightly patterned so I had to overlay it with a second layer to disguise the patterning.

But it wasn't too difficult to do that and what with my computer being messed but by me being gullible and a stupid spammer guy I actually got it done in very short order. I did have some moments of angst at this point as I really didn't want him to look like he was wearing pajamas. So he got a plain cummerbund and plain white edging to his cuffs and neckline. I should really have given him some black shoes but I lost patience I'm afraid.

I thought a plain contrasting colour cape would help tone down the sparkle, but when a friend suggested white with a red lining I decided I had to go for it. This was obviously very easy so the only problem I ran into was ironing it flat at too high a temperature. It WAS nylon and melted slightly. The second one survived ironing at a lower temperature.


I then found I had run out of stuffing but one of my amazing friends at work again brought me some old cushion stuffing so I was saved!

Somehow even though I sew the template the same each time weird things happen to the way they come out, specially when I start trying to fill them with stuffing. I have decided the slightly non straight stance is because Elvis is dancing. No arguments people!

All that was left was to make some sunglasses. I would have loved to make proper aviators but I'm just not that clever so it was just a simple shape.

I hope my friend's husband likes him! I have got another real person coming up soon.