elephant in progress
I’m still working on the animals I was talking about a while back. There has been more unnecessary law & order watching than sewing, but there is some progress. I’ve never actually drafted a pattern for one of my toys before and it’s pretty time consuming–especially when you have an anal retentive side. I wanted the elephant to have a big head gusset that would extend down to his trunk and I couldn’t just whip this up. This is my first attempt and though it looked the way I imagined, his trunk stuck out straight–Pinocchio style–when I stuffed him. I made a few more and could have kept on making a little muslin menagerie, but I’m trying to make my toys less straight and narrow and more folky and improvised (strangely it’s the latter that needs a pattern).
So I cut into this amazing sparkley striped linen I got from namolio’s shop. I was going to make all the animals from thrifted outfits, and some still will be, but I was trying to cram too many ideas into one toy: stripes or patterned faces, moustached, thrifted outfit transformed into plush toy. Besides this grey linen was a little wrinkly just like a naked elephant.
Here he is almost done. He (ah! no name! any suggestions?) is sporting this fantastic fake moustache sent to my by Melinda (thank you again!). And after seeing little elephante sporting this polka dot moustache, I don’t know if I should use a completely different print for the moustache or make it out of the denim I used for his pants or the grey linen again, or embroider a big fluffy one. I need feed back from all of you who have made it to the end of this post.
