A long time ago on on the internet

(title to be sung to the tune of  'Long time ago in Bethlehem')
....lwell it IS still Christmas, until the 6th January darn it!

Anyhoo a while back I offered to cheer someone up with a plushie of their choice....they asked for an inanimate object. I um....only make people but I said I'd think about it. They had asked for the Delorean from Back to the future. Ummm yeah. I can do that? I think?



That's um going to be interesting

So it's Christmas, right, I'm at my parents for a long winter's hibernation. The last time I had a long stretch at my parents with not much to do it was before my nephew and I spent the time working on a special cloth book for him so this year I thought I could start some work on my more complicated projects.

Planning in paper

I don't do a lot of this with ordinary people plushies. I do sketch a bit, specially if they are complicated but often most of it is just remembering minor details of the clothing and colour of the cloth or how many separate bits there are.

As you can see from the dalek, even with complicated things, if I think I can work it out without an advance plan I often don't bother much. This time I was going to need to plan seriously as the shape was significantly more fiddly with a lot of decisions.

One of my first decisions was whether to try and make it hollow and able to accommodate the Marty and Doc Brown. This sadly was almost immediately abandoned as (a) I didn't have a plushie to hand to work out the sizing and (b) it would just be too big and I didn't have the patience.

I then tried to make a rough pattern in paper. for the main shape. If I were really trying to make a paper delorean I would have put tabs but what I wanted to create was a pattern for the cloth so I just taped the parts together.




Essentially my plan is two side pieces and a long piece wrapping round the outside, with the wheels as added extras sticking out.

One of the things I can see from constructing the model is that it needs to be wider. The long winding piece will need to be probably twice as wide. I can also see that the door is wrong, and looking at reference pictures I can see what's gone wrong, the door doesn't flap up from the frame of the car, it flaps up from a bit that runs through the middle of the roof.

I think there will be an internal space with seats but the bonnet and boot blocked in and stuffed. but I haven't worked out how to deal with the windscreen - opaque piece of fabric in "blue", clear plastic (NB where would I get that, how would I sew it in place?), or just empty space.

I will probably also be using some pipe cleaners to create some stronger framework, probably not throughout but just around the empty space of the ?cockpit? drivers area? WHATEVER that space is called. And will probably need some interfacing throughout to give it some way to be less curvy and more blocky like a car.

The seats are definitely going to be added in afterwards created separately.

When, when, when, little hen will you make me a d'lorean for my tea

Well I know I've put this off for a while but there are two little people plushies I owe really before I get to the Delorean. Namely:

• Another Babydoll from Suckerpunch
• Another 11th Doctor this time with fez

But I think that after that I will be able to get on to the Delorean probably. Another factor that will slow me down is I don't have an awful lot of grey fabric. I did have for ages but it got used up making the dalek so I'll need to buy some. Plus some significant amount of interfacing. I also want some for another project so that's not going to be a problem.