Happy Sleepy Suavey in tangerine velvet and chocolate brown leather

Magda — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:33:05 +0000

The latest addition to the shop is Happy Sleepy Suavey, made from
orange cotton velvet with brown suede “sunglasses” applique. When turned upside down, the sunglasses look like a mustache.

The sunglasses/mustache were partly conceived to remedy a horribly botched embroidery job. It took me a long time to get better at embroidering, it was very frustrating, and this toy is from an earlier batch when I was still learning. I embroider the eyes at the very end of the making process, after the creature is all sewn and stuffed and closed, and the velvet is unforgiving. There’s no ripping out and redoing the eye embroidery because the velvet texture gets destroyed, so redesign was involved. Brown suede applique to the rescue, and another OOAK is born.

See Happy Sleepy Suavey in the Happy Sleepy Art and Toys Shop.

The process of cutting and sewing the Happy Sleepy pelts

Magda — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:29:48 +0000

There’s been a flurry of real in the world making activity all fall around here. I delight in having the laptop set up right beside the sewing machine set up right beside the cutting table, opposite the shelves of materials and tools. I glee up every time I pull a suitcase from under a table to rummage in my collection of fabrics, which is what the suitcases hold these days instead of clothes, books and other travel essentials. In short, I’m loving my studio space.

I’ve been dipping into the existing fabrics and clearing out small remnants, with the result that the latest Happy Sleepy designs have been pieced from contrasting colours and patterns, and each one these days is unique ane one of a kind because I won’t be able to recreate them once this fabric is gone. More importantly, using up existing fabrics and a few sales means I can buy more fabrics!

Creative mess also makes for good photo op. The images below show how two recent fauna were made.

Flurry of cutting and piecing on the work table. My favourite shears were recently profesionally resharpened and now glide through multiple fabric layers like a heated knife through butter. Whoosh-chuk!

Here are Happy Sleepy Cyan Tutu as a pieced and cut fabric, and Retina Adjuster all sewn up and ready to flip. That's my fabourite part, the flipping the pelt inside out. It's the most dramatic part of the whole process.

At this stage, I think of these as pelts, when they are all ready to stuff and you can start to have an idea of the Happy Sleepy will look like. After this I still have to stuff, sew it, and embroider the eyes.

Happy Sleepy Cyan Tutu in velvet orange and turquoise fun fur.

Happy Sleepy Retina Adjuster in turquoise silk and red wool. The name says it all - the colour is so bright as to be unphotographable, and it actually kind of hurts your eyes to look at him... Not for the colour faint of heart, that's for sure!

These two creatures are now in the Happy Sleepy Art and Toys Shop on Etsy – here is Cyan Tutu, and here is Retina Adjuster.

Land of Happy Sleepy » sewing

Happy Sleepy Suavey in tangerine velvet and chocolate brown leather

The process of cutting and sewing the Happy Sleepy pelts