Ive had a rough year, residence-wise, & have had to hiatus all my creative stuff, which in turn really bummed me out & made it harder & harder to get back into it.
Sort of compounded with the lack of interest in something i worked super hard on, ive been scraping motivation from the walls of my well to reignite my engine.
I mused about what would stimulate my interest the most, & thats usually learning something new that i can geek out on, ideally something that would contribute to my permanent bag of skills.
I recently was able to secure a hopefully more permanent place to live at least for a few years or more. I wanted to make the place a little cozier since the only non-essentials i lug around with me when i move are my old paintings, my tools of the trade, & some pieces of furniture.
I had never gotten around to getting pillows for my secondhand couch, & wanted to treat myself. I had this idea that i really wanted a Gengar pillow. There were some available online that werent great, or just could have been better if they werent designed to be commodities.
As i dug a little deeper, i started seeing other more detailed versions they called plushies, then i found other pokemon characters & other homemade plushies that were really impressive, but i still couldnt find a Gengar that looked the way i thought it should look.
It was then that i thought, why dont i just friggin make my own??
I started reading about plush making. I already owned a cheap sewing machine for some ripped clothes i never got around to mending. Then i realized this could be that new thing to geek out on ive been waiting for.
I researched everything i thought i needed to know, then the other stuff i didnt know i needed to research, then what supplies i needed to buy. Shopped for a few yards of fabric i thought would be the closest match to what i pictured in my head.
Turns out, most people use minky for plushes, but i wanted to use satin & other unconventional fabrix. In retrospect, i bought too much odds & ends & could have narrowed it down, but most of this sewing stuff is pretty cheap, so not a big loss.
I thought i should do some sort of test before embarking on such an ambitious project (for someone who literally has no experience with the medium). I thought that id need a pin cushion & it could be a simple first project. It was originally going to be a Pokeball, but thought it would be cool to make a Voltorb instead.
I learned so much after completely & utterly botching my first attempt, just unspeakable lmao.
The importance of proper seam allowance design cannot be understated. Planning where to start, where to end, where to leave a gap for flipping inside out, where to cut pinking/darts/gussets to avoid deformation, what to trim, & thats just for a single color pattern! Using x2 colours compounds everything, but i ended up using white thread to avoid changing to red mid seam (which i regret).
I thought using a x5 dart sphere would be more invigorating practice than a x4 dart sphere. Then i thought id leave the top colour connected in a row, then same for bottom. In retrospect, i could have still left them connected even if i had added a bit more spacing to fold as a seam allowance. I thought that by leaving them connected i could avoid a full length visible seam, but after the first dart i realized that i would end up with "corners" at the ends of those seams, losing roundness. So i ended up trying to sew full seams anyway to maintain a round curve, but obviously ran into air since i butted the darts so close together.
I had planned to do some needle sculpting for the eyes, but realized i didnt want to anchor the knot on the back surface since it was already distorted enough. I still did some really minor sculpting but hit the learning curve on hand backstitch embroidery pretty hard when trying to map my stitches for the eyebrows. Its deceptively cerebral to be mindful of where to pass the thread above & beneath the fabric & how tight to pull & the effect of adding multiple anchors & strategizing their positions according to how they may affect past stitches & stitches not even placed yet.
I used a pleather material for the eyes, hot glued in position, detailed with a sharpie, then partially sewed onto the eyebrows.
I managed to take my 2nd attempt to the finishline, its still ugly, but was really valuable experience earned. I added some ball bearings as a weight to the bottom, filled with polyfill, sewed the gap shut, then did a few touchup seams at those corners i mentioned earlier in white & red.
Heres the result, it works as a pin cushion & i feel inspired/refreshed & excited to start the pattern design for the Gengar plush/pillow, i even started prelims for another plush/pillow after that.
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