Belatedly things get a bit stormy....

From one deity (Loki) to his brother, Thor, God of Thunder.

I prefer reference material that goes back to the source the person wants - in this case the films, but sometimes it's hard to get all the details. And to get them all in one image.

I found this image which seemed from other pictures to have a lot of useful details visible.

The first thing I realised was that there were a lot of details that I couldn't possibly hope to replicate in a plushie both due to scale and the style of the object. In addition I didn't have much actual silvery colour but I did want some metallic elements, so I had to decide how to use it to best effect.

What I aimed for was a general impression of the costume rather than a replica.

In some ways the costume was simpler than Loki's as there was not an extra coat. In essence you have Thor's suit and boots, and you have a cloak, as opposed to Loki's suit with tunic, coat and cloak.

In addition I had wanted to make some proper flowing hair as I had with Loki but I never got round to sourcing yellow wool so I just stuck with cloth. I liked this goldy cloth though so it came out alright even if it was a toughie to hem for the beard.  I didn't have any bits large enough to do it in one piece but I kind of liked that effect as it sort of felt like different swathes of hair.

The first stage of Thor was putting together all the different bits for the body without cloak.

Thor's actual sleeve has a sort of mail bit and a cuff that is smooth. A plushie's arm is too short for that so I just gave him a silver sleeve.The next bit I added on was the belt and the front details of the armour.

Once I completed the basic Thor front and back I hemmed up the cloak and created two small silvery bits to attach the cloak to Thor. The cloak is not detatchable and can't be removed.

I had always planned to do a helmet but I didn't have enough silver for the whole thing. or to cover it entirely in silver.

So I decided to do it in grey felt. However while I wasn't sure at first about using the left over pieces to add silver details, I decided I had enough, so I made the wings on the side completely silver and used silver pieces at the front and over the back and top to give some extra feeling of silver without having to cover the entire thing. I also added some paper between the felt and silver to the wings to give them some stiffness.

So there you have him. The new owner thinks he his ace! I would have liked to have made a hammer but I didn't have any feelings about how I wanted to do it, and the owner has a little hammer keyring which fits! Plus he seems to look like a blond bearded friend of mine! No not Chris Hemsworth, I'm not connected to famous people. He's an English teacher.

I STILL aten't dead - but Loki is done and dusted!

I stayed up all night to get Loki....or rather I dropped everything to finish Loki in time for Christmas as he's a present from one friend to another.

Loki's costume as I mentioned between the Thor films and Avengers and variants within is a complex costume. I am endlessly grateful to a friend of mine who having cosplayed a Loki had lots of reference pics to help me, and as another friend had made the costume I loved that I was using Loki cosplay offcuts to make a Loki plushie.

I essentially decided to go with a version of his golden-y armour to add a bit of extra bright to the other dull colour palate of dark green and blacks.



I had to plan how I was going to do it layer by layer as you can see from the drawings


I had a bit of time dithering about fabrics because although I wanted to use some of my fake black leather stash I just didn't fancy sewing too much fake leather. In the end I decided this Loki would not have leather boots as I just couldn't face an almost entirely leather base body.


Once I started making the basic body it was fiddly with several different fabrics coming together. I am always adapting the pattern but I'm also very forgetful of things that don't work.
As you can see here I forgot quite how to get the hair to come out above his face properly as I had been distracted by the slicked back seal like quality of Loki's hair in the movies.
Loki plushie came out looking bald not slicked back.

This then left me with essentially making a cap of hair to fit over the top and sew down to add to his hair.

That being more or less sorted I headed on to making the coat. I still wasn't entirely happy with the hair though. Although I always regret it while I'm using it I really wanted to make the zip like edge of Loki's coat using my metallic gold thread and I like to think it came out pretty darned well.

That being said the coat was made of a thicker fake leather than the basic body's tunic meaning it was really really annoying to sew.

I also carefully lined the coat only to remember he has 3 tails and had to unpick the side stitching and cut 2 v's in the back to make the three tails. Sadly after all that effort I didn't photograph that particular detail.

I then made the cloak. Before I moved on to make the helmet and staff I started to dither about the hair and consulted friends about possibly adding some thin wool so he had those sort of rats tails under his helmet. With at least one friend's affirmative I went ahead. As I sewed each one down individually it has come out looking a bit like braids but I don't mind it much.


The final details were the helmet and staff. I really wanted to make the pointy back shape of the helmet

But once I'd made the helmet, sewing a ridge for the pointy-ness just didn't work. Then I went on to the staff.

I originally planned to make it with just a few bits of pipe cleaner in yellow and grey and some blue cloth. But it didn't look all that great. I can't find any photos of it when it looked like that.

So I kept pipe cleaners for the basic staff, but used some felt sewn to a couple of layers of paper for the knife blades and scammed some blue beads off a friend for the jewelly thingy. With that it went off in good time for Christmas present gifting and both the person who had requested it and the recipient appear to like him very well.

But what about the ALPHABET?

What? An alphabet you say? No idea what you're talking about. OK OK I'm kidding. I'm still working on it after my brief hiatus but I'm at a dull stage. I'm making all the backs. There's not much to see as such.... I'm up to letter R and they're looking spiffy.

Here's a pic of it hung up at my parents' house when I'd got as far as O.

Sewing through the tough plastic-ky velcro strips has necessitated some new tools - rubber thimbles. They don't stop needle pricks completely but they do allow gripping and give some good protection, plus they're slightly warming! They look a bit weird though. I am however glad for the tip from a friend who suggested them.

I aten't dead

Alphabet News

Z is for what exactly?

I know what you're thinking, where the frak is the letter Z for Zaphod Beeblebrox and well, you'd be right I haven't posted it yet. Stuff happened and things, things also happened. I reassure you dear reader, I have completed Z. In fact I've completed another of the extra letters. As part of being considerate and maintaining my friend's privacy over her child, I have decided I won't be posting any of those letters up. Although it is doubtful anyone could guess their name and surname just from seeing 3 extra letters I don't wish to run that risk.

Overall project progress

Further news - I've finally got all the velcro I need for the sticking up, and have started working on the attachment. The fuzzy half of the velcro is pinned in place on the backing cloth and my lovely Mum has attached a pole to the top.

I've even started sewing on the first back of a letter. I decided I would die of boredom if I made all the backs at once and then sewed them all on. So I will be making one back at a time and then sewing it on one at a time. This means that the letter A is almost completely done, velcro and all!!!! Wooo!

New plushie on the horizon

So someone asked me to make a new plushie, and not any old plushie........it's....erm Loki from Thor and Avengers movie.

I'm simultaneously very yay and a bit argh! Panic!

Today I thought I'd start working out what needs to be made and in what colours, and as always I was bemused by costume variants both within movies and between movies.

Clearly he will have a helmet. With horns. Obviously.
But then there's

• cape/no cape variants
• armour/no armour
• two different staves
  and
• various shoulder pad combinations.

 Obviously my plushie will not be a perfect copy of any of these outfits. I'm not made of magic people!

Currently my plan is :

• Basic body of plushie will have the tunic that sort of has a v cutout on the front
• Coat with no sleeves over the top lined with green mid calf length
• Cape attached to the coat with no sleeves in green

I can't work out if I will be putting the goldy armour on the coat or not but if I don't it will be quite dark. That's partly why I'm doing the cape. He wears a lot of black.

Anyhoo I will be asking my lovely friends who made a full scale femme version of the costume to help out and advise!

Links for reference

Loki cosplay tumblr
Loki cosplay photobucket picture refs

G[r]eek Alphabet - Y is for Yggdrasil

I've talked about this before but Yggdrasil is the world tree, a figure from Norse mythology.

This was going to be a composition with lots of greens and earth tones. I did debate whether to have a bright tree on a dark background or vice versa, but with some back up opinions I decided to stick with the dark tree on a slightly lighter background.

This following was testing out the colour for the letter Y (white) and the snake (greeny yellow).

I had looked up some deer pictures for colour reference but I decided that I needed a contrast and I couldn't face such fine hemming so I used some fake leather that wouldn't need hemming for both the tree and the deer.

Final debate was about the width of the letter Y. Mostly I've used this type of ribbon at full width but when I laid it over the tree, you couldn't see the tree either side.

 So instead I decided I would use it half thickness.

 This is an early stage of sewing down. The tree is partially sewn down, the tree also, the deer are started sewing and the snake is in progress.

 Snake completely sewn down, I'm on to the details! One of the things you can see from this picture to the next is that I've used embroidery to slightly tidy the outlines of the snake, specially at the head and tail. This was to smooth the outline which was hard to create while sewing down quite a thick snake.

 One of the things I decided late on was that the slight leaves embroidery was too bright. I decided to over sew with darker colours to tone it down. The squirrel, part of the original design was debated a bit as to whether I wanted to include it in such a busy design, but I decided I wanted a squirrel so I put him in. The raven however, did not make the cut.

Mythology Spot

For more lovely info on the mythos of Yggdrasil try this great article Norse Mythology : Yggdrasil and the Well of Urd.

In summary of the details I've included.

• The squirrel is Ratatosk - a messenger animal
• The snake is probably Nidhogg, a snake who gnaws at the roots
• The deer are two of the 4 that spend time in the tree. Their names are Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Dyrathror. There wasn't room for 4 deer - sorry.
  

G[r]eek Alphabet : U is for Unicorn

There were a looooooot of pictures in my last post, mostly not of sewing. I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles dear reader.

I will only picspam you once therefore. When I put together the fabric for this design I had this image in my head. It looked a bit like this, only green instead of red:

Anyway my friend says - that's gonna be waaaaaay hard. Only she hadn't seen the base fabric so she didn't know I didn't have to do the background. Bwahahaha!

The curve of the U took quite a few pins but as the unicorn was basically one piece of felt that didn't need many pins. Huzzah! By choosing a transparent silver, I had to double layer it with white underneath or the silver would have dulled on such a dark fabric.

I also had to fight with the fact that, as it was such a close colour match I decided to use my silver metallic thread - a thread which is basically thread wrapped in medal. It is very annoying to sew with but I got through it!

I had originally planned to use two light yellowy creams for the shading and the tail but despite looking very different on their own, Once I'd sewn them down, they looked identical so I had to switch for a darker colour, but there wasn't much left.
This next picture is me contemplating the last of that embroidery thread in that colour and wondering what I do to match the mane to the tail.

But I'm not just a pretty face...or maybe I am not that pretty you don't really know. Anyhoo, I solved by discovering that a pinky colour I'd used for some skin colours was near enough, if a bit pinkier.

Result! I also added in a tiny amount of gold stitching just for decoration into the mane and tail.

It's come out pretty darned alright I think!

G[r]eek Alphabet : P is for Pomegranate and Persephone

I wasn't entirely convinced by this design when I came to make this one. It was neat but a bit quiet and uncomplex  after some of the designs I've made.

I did debate returning to my original plan with the pomegranate below the P and Persephone's dress as she runs away but I didn't like it. I didn't want to mess up the P and turn it into a B.

As always I dithered over the colour of the letter because I couldn't use a reddish colour due to the reds in the pomegranate and I didn't want too pale a colour. None of my blues seemed appropriate either.

This photo is one I took to be able to think more on the colour of the letter while at work creating Odin.

The problem with the green I decided to use is it is technically for putting curtain hooks on curtains which means it's thick and lumpy and twice the width I wanted meaning I had to double it over to use it. I sewed the ribbon for the outside of the pomegranate to the inside flesh colour fabric and then sewed the P down quite fast as I couldn't use pins very easily on such a thick wedge of material.

So then I was on to the seeds and the spaces where seeds had been. It worked out quite well that this was going to be done over the top in embroidery because I hadn't managed to keep the white very flat while sewing down the P. I only have so many fingers. I had decided that the seeds would be made out of large decorative knots and the spaces of where seeds used to be would be small sewn stitches in circles.

I was worried that the knots would take a long time and had doubled up the thread to make extra quick large knots. It meant I went through thread fast but the knots actually went pretty quickly as did the empty places where seeds had been.

 The final design decision was to add an extra bit of pink around the end of the P to add some definition to the letter.

Mythology spot

So what has a pomegranate got to do with Persephone? This is a classic abduction story from Greek mythology. Hades kidnaps Persephone and makes her his Queen. Her mother Demeter hunts for him and begs Zeus to get her daughter back. Persephone pines for the above world and refuses to eat anything in the underworld. When Zeus intervenes to get her back Hades says she can go back if she hasn't eaten anything....Persephone says she hasn't but the gardener says she has - she has eaten half the seeds of a pomegranate. However Hades still lets her go back but only for half the year. Or something along those lines. Thus the seasons are born. It's summer and spring when she comes above ground and autumn and winter when she is in the underworld as Demeter - a harvest goddess is sad.

Other fun Persephone facts - in some source(s) she is said to be the creator of human life instead of Prometheus, and sometimes she is said not to be Demeter's daughter but Zeus and Styx (the River that takes you to the underworld).

All this and more from the Theoi article on Persephone : Greek queen of the underworld and spring

Crazy factoid about me and Pomegranates

I had never eaten pomegranate until about 5 years ago. As a child I read this myth and wondered why she was eating the seeds and not the fruit. Having eaten one, mystery solved! That's what you eat in a pomegranate!!