Bigger projects

A few years ago, I made a cloth book out of the poem "By a babe unborn" by GK Chesterton for my then unborn nephew. I gave it to him and his family when he was two weeks old and we visited. At some point I will blog and post pictures of what it ended up looking like.

He's now 2 1/2 and has a baby sister who is nearly half a year old. Although we were all very excited by this second arrival it was not so hyper exciting as baby number 1 and I think I was just distracted so instead of making a book before she's born (a bit late now) I am now planning a book when she's already here. I've mentioned this cloth book project before but I'm now a bit further on.

Before I share some drawings I think I should mention that this is a simpler project than either the Chesterton poem book or even the G[r]eek Alphabet. The imagery is not too complex but I'm determined to have some fun along the way with it.

The snail has a house/Die schneke hat ein haus

The snail's shell is its house but I don't just want a picture of a snail. The shell will be a flap that can be lifted to see inside a sort of single room dolls house. Although I drew the inside on a separate piece of paper, in fact it's the shell that will be separate and the inside of the shell will be part of the page.

You may be able to see in my sketch pad that the words have been altered slightly. This is because when I made my first plans in the sketch book I had to look up the exact words because I don't speak German and memorised this nursery rhyme some time back. I wanted to get it right. Unfortunately as with many nursery rhymes, there are slight variations on nursery rhymes, and when I was showing my drawings to my Mum she said those weren't the words my Omi used, so as I drew my full scale drawings I went through "correcting" the words to match the typed up words my Mum has for the nursery rhyme from my grandmother. Here the variation is small. The version I found online said "ihr haus" - her house, Omi said "ein haus" - a house

Ein fellchen hat die maus/A fur coat has the mouse

To play a bit more with the fur coat on the mouse I decided the mouse would be wearing a separate fur coat. And then I decided that there had to be a reason, so the mouse was to be going to the opera, to see "Die fledermaus" because reasons. The tiara is a late addition.

The sparrow has fine feathers/Der sperling hat feine federlein

This is another place where the words I found online varied from those written down by my mother. Internet said "die federn fein", Omi's words said "feine federlein". Anyway again I wanted to have some fun with the idea and thought that I would like to have the sparrow flying a biplane. I may try and make the propeller something that can spin.

Das schmetterling bunte flugelein/The butterfly has beautiful wings

Another set of word variations. Internet said "der falter seine flugelein", Omi's words "das schmetterling bunte flugelein". Not sure what the difference is. Anyway. I think I will make the wings flaps. Having varied the word placement they will probably go as they do in the bottom left, on the wings themselves in a mirror pattern. I haven't decided if there will be other decorative details.

Die eltern / Nun sage mir, was hast den du? / My dear child what have then you?

Although my grandmother's version didn't have this phrase /Die eltern and das kind for each of the verses, I like the idea that one verse is the adult's or older person's and the other is the child's. I decided that as there wasn't much to put on this page from the words I would put a little old lady sort of in the style of my Omi. My niece and nephew's grandmothers don't look anything like this. On one side, red hair long and straightened with a fringe, on the other side (my Mum) short curly blond hair, both are slim.

Das Kind / Ich habe kleider und auch shuh / I have clothes and shoes

I am debating having a way to allow the child to be dressable and for the shoes to be able to be put on but still attached maybe by a cord. Maybe if the velcro is pink? I don't know I'll have a think.

Father and mother, love and life / Vater und mutter, lust und leben

I had thought of putting "lust und leben " on a separate page, but I couldn't think of anything so it's ended up on this page. The main idea for the is design was a sort of family portrait (ish). The extra words also save me from drawing careful legs....

Das hat mir der liebe Gott gegeben / This has good God given me

This is basically a decorative design based on the cross. I decided that I wanted to use a form of the cross that I met when I went to World youth day in Madrid. It's a Dehonian cross from the Dehonian order who hosted my group while we were there.

Conveniently this brings me to 8 pages, although due to my style of page construction, I just need pages to go in pairs as the front and back are separate and sewn together.

This is probably all you will see of this project for a bit as I've got about 3 plushies (one of which is the car) to do first. Unless I get bored and mix them all up together... not into one project but not do them consecutively I mean.

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.

Sinistral dexterity and all that

I'm a bit out of sequence but what the heck. So I made a Hermione, the latest in a long line of Harry Potter plushies (well, long enough for me. So far : Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape).

Hermione demonstrates the two rules of asking me for things:

1. Don't wait yourself till I'm free, you may never notice when I am, I'm always faffing about the place.
2. Never say "whenever you're free" because that may take forever and never happen


As a result I'm afraid I was asked for this some long time back and only now got round to it. And when I say some time back I mean a long while back. Not sure when it was actually.

Anyhoo I didn't put a ton of thought into it and basically riffed off the Harry Potter I made some time back.

I did originally try and make her hair just from cloth as I did with Thor. Unfortunately it mostly came out wonky.

Which I then had to fix

I then made some debate about whether I could find a way to make curly hair or curl some wool to make it curly and gave up, she was going to have straightish brown wool hair bought for the purpose and sewn in place.

I always love cutting the hair to the right length.
 

Final detail was the wand, which, with foolish haste I accidentally sewed to the left hand.

Pretty sure she's not a lefty like me.




The wand was a random colour wrapped in brown wool as I didn't have a brown piece of pipe cleaner. Owner seems happy though.

Whoops - That thing where you've missed a bit

In writing my recent blogpost I realised I had never written up about making Clara Clayton/Brown. I can't reproduce most of my thoughts about the process at such a remove. I did have some debate about what she should be wearing but eventually settled on this outfit, partly through the exigencies of what I had available, fabric-wise.


It was a comparatively simple basic design, as I now do as standard, the basic doll is made and the skirt is sewn onto it once the main plushie is sewn and stuffed.

The only special part of the design from my part, was to include a bustle, which sadly I have not photographed. I put some addition padding on her posterior as mostly the plushies have no bottom to speak of. Bustles always make me think of my Oma, who had to wear one, and who told me people were very jealous of her posterior because it meant she didn't have to wear much of a bustle(!).



The other fiddly part was the hat. I made a roll of filler out of some leftovers from deconstructing the shinpads to make the Wonderwoman bracers, and then covered it with ribbon and did something similar for the brim, then added the ribbon. I had some spare around and this meant the new owner could have two alternative colours as they chose. The hat was then sewn onto the head. It is not removable.
 
The final touch was a small bit of silver decoration in embroidery for the buttons and edging. A sensible woman would have done this at an earlier stage like Clara's frizzy fringe, unfortunately I'm not a sensible woman so I did it pretty much last.


As far as I can tell the new owner is very very happy.

One two, skip a few....

So my latest blogpost is about the second project after the Babydoll plushie but I don't have have the photos on hand for the one in between, so I'm writing about it anyway out of sequence, messing with my librarian orderly brain. I know. It hurts.

So the sequence of making was :

• Babydoll (Suckerpunch)
• Hermione Granger
• Oswin Oswald/Dalek

Who is Clara? Why is Clara?

A while back my friend said that her daughter would like a Clara to go with her 11th Doctor as her Christmas present. I said OK and thought very little of it as Christmas was a while away,  and I got on with some other projects and life and stuff. Then recently I was buying presents and I said "What does your daughter want for Christmas." and she said, you agreed to make Clara  but it's OK if you can't now. And I was like "no, no, I'll do it."

The problem I have is that while Clara/Oswin/whatever dresses very nicely I'm sure, it's not exactly iconic or anything. Her Clara the governess is quite iconic I suppose but I'd just made Clara Clayton/Brown who is also in a sort of Victorian outfit and I didn't want to have a feeling of deja vu.

I know Clara is less brightly coloured but still once translated into plushie there wouldn't be a ton of difference.

So I had this inspiration - I would do Clara, well not really Clara, Oswin Oswald who is actually a dalek and I would make a dalek that is hollow for her to go in because she's a dalek - see?

It'll be fine I've got plenty of time I told myself and then started slightly frantically sewing.

Making Oswin

I've got to admit that Oswin's outfit wasn't that exciting and I was much more interested in the hollow dalek. As I was working from my own ideas and not a proper pattern, I wanted to finish Oswin as fast as possible in order to know the dimensions of the space I needed to incorporate into the dalek's body. My plushies are all more or less the same size but it's not an exact science and things do vary. Plus I have not kept any of them so I didn't have one to hand to measure with.

Oswin's outfit also had the convenience of my accidental excess purchase of red felt (I've now got miles of the stuff from my perspective). So with only a cursory glance at pictures of Oswin, I set to work.


Having struggled with longer brown hair with Hermione and given up and put on wool I knew I'd be doing the same this time.

I then started sewing on the wool hair. In my head I though Oswin had a fringe or that Clara did but I hadn't thought too hard about it. As a result I thought I'd done her hair and it looked like this

Doing some research afterwards she has had sort of a long fringe that rarely sits on her forehead.

but the key point is, not as Oswin if you look at the earlier reference image.
I only registered this fact after I'd done the hair. Although I do take mistakes in my stride and of course make choices in my plushies for some reason I just didn't like that I'd got this wrong, so I added further wool to fix her fringe.

Although this gave Clara rather ridiculously large hair it mainly made me feel better.

Oswin the Dalek

With Oswin made, I moved on to the dalek.

Colour scheme

I knew immediately I would not be making the dalek the real colours of Oswin's dalek or even the most common colour that I remember seeing - the sort of goldy colour with black etc.



I didn't really have the right materials to hand and I didn't have time and also I don't know I just didn't feel like it. I had, however a fair amount of grey felt that I planned to use.

I hunted around for other colour schemes and settled on one with a grey base and black details.

I liked this one, so I based my design on this.

Making the dalek in sections - the main body piece

In making the dalek I confess I kind of made it up as I went along. I wrapped a long piece around the Oswin plushie to get the measurement around her and found the piece I had was a bit short so I added a black bit to the bottom and top which also fit with the design but added height.

I wanted the hollow dalek to sort of stand up on its own even without the Oswin inside, so I was prepared for it to need some stiffening so after sewing on the black roundels I ironed on interfacing.

Base of the dalek

I then had to work out the base and the head. The head needed to be all of one piece as it's visible but I was prepared for a much less tidy base. I didn't have enough fabric to use one whole piece so I sewed some bits together to make the base and sewed it in.



Dome of the dalek head

The dome of the head was a bit of a puzzle but I basically had one large bit of grey left so that was the maximum curve I could make. I wasn't entirely sure how to make a dome but I figured a circle of fabric with slits in should be able to be overlapped to work and then sewn down, so I tested it with a paper template. This paper circle was the largest size of circle my largest piece of grey felt would be able to cut out.

I then used this as a pattern for the dome. There was not really enough fabric left for the base of the dome so I used a navy material I had plenty of as I figured the base would not be very visible and it would be better for it to be dark. I made a pattern for the base the right size for the hole at the top of the tube for the base and constructed the dome to curve to match the base. I then unpinned the base and sewed up the dome.

For the eye stalk I used a black pipe cleaner, I cut a hole in the dome and sewed it in place. The eye at the end came after. I also made the two antennae things by rolling small pieces of yellow-white felt and sewing them in place.

I then turned the dome inside out and sewed it onto the base.  I stuffed the dome and sewed up the last part.

I then sewed the dome into the tube of the dalek body.

The dalek now needed some arms. Unfortunately I didn't have any more black pipe cleaners. I did try just using blue ones but it didn't look right when I sewed them in place so I made covers out of leftover black felt.


I still wanted some further detail. To make the eye stalk look more accurate I made the end section using a grey circle folded to curve round and sewn into place, and then added a pale yellow white smaller circle for the centre of the eye stalk. To make the bit before that I had a pipe cleaner in the perfect colour which I just wrapped around tightly to create the blob.


Final details of the dalek

At this point I had found that really interfacing was not enough to hold the dalek up safely without anything inside. So I sewed in some pipe cleaners  inside to give it some extra strength.


This was a real pain at this stage as I also had to cover the ends which are a bit sharp, and sewing inside was a bit arm twisting. Fortunately pipe cleaners are also designed to bend so I could bend them the wrong way to get at things.

I used a similar technique as the end of the eye stalk to make the plunger.


The most fiddly bit was making the other ray gun arm details. The strips of thin grey felt were very fiddly to keep in place and sew into place and would have been much less secure if not for the bands of grey felt circling the arm.


End result is a free standing hollow dalek and Clara!