Plushies (not Furries... get your mind out of the gutter)

For the uninitiated, in modern parlance stuffed animals are called "plushies". I suppose it's because they are so rarely animals anymore. From UglyDolls to microbes, anything can be a plushie these days.

Jiker - pretty cute UglyDoll

This is a plushie of the herpes virus. I swear to god.

On Friday, our Crafting for Charity group had its fourth quarter meeting. After the debacle with the baby kimonos last quarter, Cassandra and I decided to do something different with our remaining flannel. So, inspired by our friend Emily at Bluestar, Ink. (please go check out her amazing work!) we figured we'd try our hand and some plushies of our own.


Cassandra designed a couple of super-sweet and simple patterns for us to use. One of our members had some fur left over from a Halloween costume so Cassandra decided to make a wolf:

Wolf

And she made a bunny for me:

Bunny

I didn't end up making the bunny evil, even though Cassandra left me the option by giving him pointy teeth. Also, she eventually added a 1/2 inch seam allowance to the illustration which was really helpful.

One friend, Erin, did the sock monkey from the book Craft Hope by Jade Sims. That turned out to be a pretty easy pattern - even though she made it difficult by purchasing chenille socks that were a b*tch to work with. LOL

I started my afternoon by finishing up the last baby kimono. I had to fix the hand flaps (I'd sewed them incorrectly) and add the tie closures. While I was doing that, Cassandra and Erin started their plushies. Cassandra did a lot of handwork on hers - embroidering the face and making the furry ears separate from the rest of the doll - and, well, Erin had the aforementioned struggle with the chenille. I kept my doll simple. I cut a front and back from the same flannel fabric then added a coordinating colored "face", paw pads, and inside ears. I machine-sewed the whiskers and the triangle nose, then added a couple of buttons for eyes. We all finished up at about the same time. And here's our final product!

The Usual Suspects

Wolf detail (love the chest hair!)

All in all, these were pretty easy to make. Now that we have the basic pattern down, we'll probably try to knock out a few more at our next meeting. Then they'll be donated to the Children's Hospital here in town.

On a separate note, on Saturday we delivered about 10 fleece pet beds to the Humane Society. We made these by taking the no-sew fleece blanket kits from Joann Fabrics, cutting them in half (to make two smaller "blankets") and stuffing them with a thin layer of polyfill. They seemed really happy to receive them. Also, our knitters are knocking out newborn caps at an alarming rate. At some point soon, those will be delivered to the NICU at one of our local hospitals.

Finally, our group got featured in our company newsletter. Based on the response, the idea is pretty popular so, hopefully, we'll inspire some folks to start their own groups.

- Alex