A friend of mine had a copy of Steampunk Softies which always looked rather cool. Last Christmas, I made another friend a felt doll of himself as a teenager, so I knew felt was easy to work with. These two things together meant that I knew I wanted to make some kind of little felt doll. So I got on amazon.
I didn't want to buy a copy of Steampunk Softies because I can always borrow it. So I found something vaguely similar - Zombie Felties!
It includes 16 patterns for zombie felties, ranging from a simple duckie to a complex zombie bride. Each has a skull rating from one to four to indicate the difficulty, and the authors recommend starting with a one-skill project. So I did. I made a zombie puppy.
You begin by tracing the shapes given onto tracing paper. However, I redrew mine onto graph paper - happily, there are squares drawn behind the shapes that make them fairly easy to increase in this way.
The size of the pieces you can see behind my cut-outs is the actual intended size; the author's don't intend for you to increase them. This was clearly fucking ridiculous and I doubled them, hence the graph paper instead of tracing.
Once you've traced or otherwise created your templates, the next step is to pin them to felt and cut out the pieces! I couldn't find beads exactly right, but I found some reasonably close red buttons.
The next step was to glue some of the pieces together. I left them under a pile of books for two days and they didn't dry completely, so I put them in front of the heater for half an hour. That did it.
Once the pieces are glued you start the embroidering. I feel like my first attempt at satin stitch went pretty well!
Finally, you stitch the head up and sew it onto the body. Only the head is stuffed; the body is simply two pieces glued together.
Ta da! Zombie puppy with bloody human thigh bone. Realistically, it only took me an hour or two of actual work. I have a little experience with following a sewing pattern, though I've only actually made one thing successfully from my two previous attempts. Three colours of felt were required, despite only using scraps of the cream and white. You could easily make the bone white instead of cream to save a little bit.
I've got enough fabric to make another three at the same size. I've put the pattern pieces into an envelope that I'll keep with the book just in case. I am quite tempted to make another, more ambitious one. There's a nice one that's only two skulls.
I'm not usually the type to start with the easy one; my method, in life as in video-games, is to find and defeat the trickiest thing I can for the experience, which leapfrogs me over some tedious level grinding and straight into the fun stuff. This tends to work better in video-games than life. In real life, the tedious level ginding is often necessary.
My next project is from Knitting MochiMochi, which I received as a Christmas present two years ago. I'll let you know how that goes!
No comments:
Post a Comment