Monsters!

On one of my many shopping sprees in Cardiff I came across a roll of brightly coloured felt. Being the magpie that I am I just couldn't resist buying it! However that left me in the predicament of what to do with all this funky felt. Originally I thought of just using it all and turning it into a stripy pillow cover thing, but then I wanted to do something a bit more interesting as I want to make a proper patchwork pillow later on. After trawling the internet whilst attempting to get out of bed I came across a site which did felt monster plushes and thought they looked pretty cool! So that's what I did!

First off I designed a couple of monster patterns, various arms and legs and eyes and things. (I had to rescale my patterns as I hadn't checked how wide the felt I bought was. Top tip always check the measurements of your fabric before you begin!) My monsters are going to be very small and thin, a pocket monster if you will! When I was happy with my monster shape, and it was the right size for the fabric I cut it out and then cut the felt around it.

This monster (aka Faye's Monster) was meant to be cute, so it is a pink monster with added a tail design to the back along with two arms in blue, and one eye in yellow (this developed as I went along, originally it was going to have 3 but I decided to keep that bit simple. I cut out the eye arms and tail free with out a pattern and to size with finished product.

I hand sewed the pupil of the eye onto the base but machine sewed the tail and the arms onto the front and the back. Have to admit I am not overly happy with how the arms look so next time I think I will use a different stitch or hand sew them, but the tail with the zigzag pattern in purple looks kinda cool!

As I decided to sew the eye and mouth on by hand after I had put it together (random decision, trying out different techniques to see which works the best so you can machine sew them on before you stuff it) I then pinned the front and back together again and machine sewed them together using a small running stitch.

Then I had to turn it inside out. Sounds simple, but the gap I had left was a tad bit too small and due to the ears and legs also being small they didn't turn out as pronounced as I would have liked and I also needed to trim down the hem to get them to turn out more. I then stuffed it with regular batting and used a pen to push it into the corners. After this I (rather crappily) hand stitched the hole together and hurray! I have a fully stuffed monster!

Finally I hand sewed the eye on and then added mouth detail. I can't tell you which stitch I used as frankly I think I made it up but it turned out ok!

And there we have a finished pocket monster!

I'll be attempting different styles, patterns and techniques later on so will update this as I progress :)