Thursday, February 18, 2010

Looks like a storm's a-comin

I was drifting about my head last week whilst wiling another day at the office away, mindlessly sketching silly nothings, when I came up with this:

And I thought to myself, “Self, I believe this would make a splendid stuffie.” So I got to work figuring out the logistics: what fabrics to use, how to make the hearts, how to sew in a pocket for the hearts to come from, etc. In true “I must do this before the inspiration fades” fashion, I dropped my intended projects for the week and went straight to the thrift store to acquire some cheap grey fleece.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised there were several grey fleece pullovers from which to choose. I decided on the biggest, softest, cheapest one and decided that should this project go well, I shan’t be wanting for more grey fleece. Thank you, performance fleece fad of the ‘90s!

That night, I set to work cutting out my cloud shape (out of habit, I started to cut a pattern out of packing paper, but then I thought, who am I kidding, it’s a CLOUD and decided to free-form it).

In my initial planning for this project (which was quite brief), I hadn’t even considered there would be pockets in whatever fleece garment I was going to purchase for fabric, so I assumed that I’d need to install a zipper and make my own pocket for the mouth, etc. But as I was inspecting my pullover, I had an “aha!” moment when I realized—hell, I can just cut out one of the pockets and sew it right in! So that’s what I did…no pocket-making, no zipper-installing. Cake.
It was a little tricky to sew up the cloud close enough to the pocket being careful not to sew the pocket closed, so I finished it up with a little hand stitching. Then I stuffed the whole thing full of stuffin’ and got to the fun part: the hearts!

I actually wasn’t sure I had enough red felt to make the hearts, so I originally tried making them out of an old red t-shirt, but after sewing up a couple of misshapen red blobs, I decided to make do with what I had of the felt. I simply cut out 2 heart shapes and sewed them together with embroidery thread using a blanket stitch. When I was just about finished sewing the heart, I stuffed it with a little stuffin’ then finished the job. It was kind of fun to be surrounded by little red hearts on my BART rides to and from the city, but even so, nobody would sit next to me…could it be the large pair of crafting scissors I wielded in my deftly working hands?
The finishing touch was sewing on his two huge mismatched eyes, and, telltale to all successful stuffies, I squealed at the sight of him and immediately had to cuddle him. The best part was going home to bring little love-showers to my loved ones.

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