ยป Making Stuffed Animals
I’ve been going through my clothes making three piles: keep, donate, and scrap.
“Scrap” is anything that has a hole, however small. I figure not even the homeless want that stuff. I’ve wanted to make stuffed animals and other toys for a while and I decided that my scrap pile is a good source of materials.
As with any new endeavor, first I had to learn the terminology. I googled around About.com and found a basic workflow…
- Dismantle fabrics.
- Design a pattern.
- Sew the pattern.
- Decorate.
- Stuff.
… as well as some info on basic techniques.
Dismantling clothing is relatively difficult because, perhaps rightly, wearable items aren’t designed for disassembly. The basic idea is to take a fabric separator and loosen all the stitches, but I’ve been using an exacto-knife with mixed results (careful not to cut yourself or destroy the fabric).
Pattern design largely involves skills similar to drawing — break the object down into easier component shapes, then render those. A large cylinder, a sphere, and a couple of tubes makes a person, thusly: o+<
Sewing the pattern is difficult, but I just learned a trick: yo-yos. These are little modular chunks that you can just sit there and sew during any kind of downtime, like when your code is building. Yo-yos decouple prep work from a variety of designs. You can dismantle a bunch of fabric, turn it all into yo-yos, and then look at what you have and see what you can make, like witches and Frankensteins.
Decoration is down to taste. I’m experimenting with different kinds of line drawing (which is easy to do with a needle and thread).
Stuff the beast with fiberfill or various kinds of beans, or mechaskeleton & a voicebox. Add electronics and weapons and glowing red LED lights to taste.
