Not a Llama

It's been awhile, and a lot has happened, but I just finished another plushie! This one is of Sylvan the Ranger, a Ramkahen character created by Galder, who was running a contest on Deviantart to depict his characters, which I made this plushie for.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although the face and hair could use a bit of work. According to my boyfriend, however, it's a funny-looking llama. I think that stemmed from the fact that I made it out of fur fabric that was way too fluffy and had to trim it down, so there was a point before I added the arms and whatnot that it looked like this:

Thankfully after the trim it looked a bit less like a llama and more like a lion-centaur thing, like it's supposed to :) However, it also left me completely covered in fluff...

How to Sew Your Dragon

This post is super late, but I wanted to wait until after I had finished making the tutorial, and that took much longer than I anticipated, especially with homework and whatnot...
But anyways, I finally made my first plush dragon from a pattern of my own!

And here is a link to the pattern and tutorial, so you can make your own if you want to! :)

A Bayleef for Bailey

So... I finally got back to making plushies for my friends. They're going to be 11th day of Christmas presents this year, just like last year... And I still have some actual Christmas presents I need to finish up... I guess that's what I'm doing all day today.

Anyways, I made a Bayleef! And this is the first plushie I've designed myself without heavily relying on other peoples' patterns or tutorials to help me that actually came out right on the first try! I sketched out the pattern yesterday, made him, and he looks cute.

The leaf on his head took a really long time to make, since I sewed a pipe cleaner to both pieces before I sewed the edges so that it would be able to stand right. I just had to make sure that those stitches never went through the other side of the felt, so they're effectively invisible :) I think the extra effort was totally worth it, though, for how well he came out!

Rock On!

With all of the Christmas music playing on the radio, I was reminded of how far behind I've gotten on making Christmas presents. But I finished another one- a little electric guitar!

Under the Sea

I feel like I've been slacking, since this is the only thing I finished in the past week... oh, well. This little octopus was a rather annoying pattern, though perhaps that was mainly because I made him pretty small, so it took a rather long time and a lot of effort to turn his arms right-side out. Also, I'm pretty sure the pattern isn't supposed to be made with felt, but something stretchier, because his head looks a bit odd...

Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty, Little Ball of Fur...

As I started making some more of the plushies for my friends for Christmas, I remembered that I had started these two little cotton candy-colored kittens last year, using the same pattern by VoodooTiki as the two sparkly ones that I had finished. So anyways, I figured that I should make sure to finish these little guys up this year. They turned out pretty good, though their heads are still a little off. Oh well. I made the teal one last, and I think it turned out a little bit better than the previous 3, at least.

I have also been working on a couple of other projects, including a couple of new pattern designs, but I’ll wait until they’re finished to post about them.

Getting a Head Start

Since last year my time-management skills for making Christmas presents was pretty much non-existent until too late, I decided it would be a good idea to start making them early this year. Especially since there are even more people on my list than last year… Also, it will hopefully give me more time to post them as I make them instead of all together, which was super long and time-consuming.

Anyways, I got two plushies finished yesterday. The first one is a little parrot, made with the Sun Conure pattern by Silver Seams. I accidentally attached his feet backwards, but he can still stand ok for a few seconds at a time, since I put pipe cleaners in his tiny feet.

The other one is this dolphin, made with a pattern by Runo. I’m glad I tried adding the mouth; I think it makes him cuter.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

So… an awful lot has happened in the last few months, and it’s about time that I got caught up. First off, I did finish the gingerbread house for my Phantom of the Opera project. I had planned it out perfectly… except it ended up being too big, whether because the cookies expanded in the oven or whatnot, I don’t know. So I had to improvise, and I made it roughly half the size it was originally meant to be…

And the people didn’t end up working either, so I got frustrated and just turned it into the scene where the chandelier has fallen. Only I pretended everyone else had run out as well… You can’t see it in the picture, but behind the box seats, there’s a platform and stairs leading down, and it looks kind of cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I had forgotten to take a picture of it until after the project was all eaten. I’m thinking I might try to make a cardboard model at some point, to see how the full thing would have worked.

Also, I had lots of gingerbread left over, so I made a little baby gingerbread house with some of the extra.

Then, after school ended, I was hurrying to finish up all of the requirements I had left for the CILT (Camper in Leadership Training) program at Camp Cherith that I was doing, which involved a lot of crafts as well. Of course, I forgot to take pictures of a lot of them… but some of the things I made were a knit baby seal,

a little carved dragon,

a dragon banner,

and a woodburned Horde coaster.

I made a bunch of other crafts, too, including three little plushies- a Mew, a bat, and a narwhal, but I ended up giving them away before I remembered to take pictures of them… Oh well.

Then, while I was at camp, I woodburned this pair of Celtic dragons:

I also made this murre, also known as a guillemot, because that’s what I had decided on for my bird name, since at Camp Cherith all of the staff use bird names instead of their real names.

My CILT buddy, Twila made one too. Her bird name is Stella, after the stellar sea eagle.

Anyways, it was lots of fun! And even though it was a bit stressful up until the very end, Twila and I both finished CILT! :)

Which Came First, the Dragon or the Eggs?

…Well, that depends on whether you mean which was started first or which was finished first…

I started the dragon first, but we made the eggs while he was like halfway finished.

Because I like to leave the best for last, and also because it works better telling it in this order, I’ll talk about the eggs first. Of course, since me and my cousins are kind of nerdy, we were trying to think of what cool things we could make the Easter eggs look like. I suggested pokeballs. So, I made a masterball and my cousin Bobby made a normal pokeball. My masterball did have the circle-y things on the top, it’s just hard to see them, since I accidentally put them a little too far back.

I then decided to try to make hearthstones… and failed miserably. The first one, I tried using a clear crayon to keep everything but the swirl white, only I obviously missed a lot of the surface… Then I tried using shaving cream, since my mom and aunt were having fun with that method, so I tried coating all but the swirl part in shaving cream and dropping blue food coloring on the exposed part, but the dye bled through the shaving cream a bit… Then I tried making the swirl of food coloring in the shaving cream and dropping the egg on top, but that didn’t work much better… Oh, well.

Then I made an atom egg, and I tried to make a Horde symbol (I realized after the Horde symbol that I’m really bad at drawing in clear wax on eggs and sort of gave up…)

My uncle made some star trek eggs. My other cousin, Rosemarie, had the great idea of outlining the shapes in sharpie!

Rosemarie also made these awesome eggs with that technique!

So now, meet my little dragon- Hearth!

I named him that because he’s the same colors as a hearthstone. Originally, I was making him as more of an ice dragon, but then when I was making the hearthstone eggs, I randomly realized that he was the same color, too. My exclamation was actually met with complete silence, because only my dad had any clue what a hearthstone was, so the rest of my family just thought I was crazy… Anyways, I added the hearthstone symbol later, after I had named him Hearth, because I thought it was appropriate.

I made him using this pattern (which again I wasn't able to find again...), and the only changes I made to it were adding a chin piece (because for some reason I couldn’t find it online when I had found the pattern…) and adding an extra layer to his wings to give them more detail.

I ended up sewing the back white piece to the blue piece only on the bottom, and the two white pieces only on the top, and then I stitched the front/detail work white piece to the blue piece. I’m pretty happy with how it looks! :)

Gotta Catch 'Em All

So, awhile ago, one of my friends asked me to make them a pokéball. And for a few months, all I had done was find a few patterns online. But then after I finished the messenger bag, I thought to myself- why not just make it, so I can cross it off my list? And honestly, it didn’t take very long at all… I’m not sure why I procrastinated so much…

I based my pattern off of this one, which I can't remember where I found...

...but anyways, I really wanted to make it look a little more accurate, and have the black ring in the middle be inverted rather than lying on top of the rest of the ball. So I sort of cut out the shape the black part would remove from the front 2 pieces, and sewed it together from the inside with a running stitch. I also added an extra white circle in the middle for the button.

I hadn’t had enough red felt to make it full-sized, so I tried my best to make it the smaller size that the pokéballs can shrink to for easy transport. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out. This is the modified pattern I made.