Stompy Mammoth!

Stompy!

Yay mammoth!  I love this little guy - I made it for M to give as a present and it's totally adorable! It's a modification of the elephant pattern from a book called Stuffed Animals: From Concept to Construction.  M saw me make the elephant project and asked if I could make a mammoth version - some long fur fabric, a re-draft to bigger tusks and this is what we get:

I told you that elephant pic was a clue.

Before you remind me how I dislike books that just have projects: this one has a handful of lessons for each project building up the theory and techniques that go into designing and making stuffed animals.

The main lesson for this project was about body gussets - adding an extra piece to provide more width to your softie (as they are referred to in the book).  In this case it's so that the elephant can stand up - there is a gusset running down his tummy and the inside of his legs.  The clever bit is the dart in the gusset so that the legs don't splay out to the sides.  This is something that is explained and illustrated really simply in the book, but something I wouldn't have thought of myself without a lot of experimentation.

This guy was definitely more challenging than the elephant.  I've worked with fur fabric before - even really long fur fabric (see Vic's insane shrug in the Gallery), but not on this kind of tiny scale.  The large body seams weren't too bad - I added a touch of extra seam allowance and didn't mind fishing some of the trapped fur out of the seams once he was turned - but sewing on the details was really tricky.  His eyes and tusks are sewn directly onto the otherwise completed mammoth, but it's really hard to tell where the fluff end and the actual structure of the fabric begins.  The eyes have so many layers I'm sure they're on securely enough, but there's so little surface area of tusks to mammoth that I'm not so sure about them.

off on the trail together...

 Some day I'd like to design my own softie from scratch, but I think that's a long way off...especially with all the other things I want to learn too!