Rag Pets

Progress

The Forest Friends, my trio for PlushYou!, are coming along nicely. It feels so good to be making things again, after such a long uncreative spell. While my mojo certainly isn't all back yet, it's still very good to create!

Along with getting back into the crafting groove, the bright sunshine and beautiful blue skies of summer are lifting my mood too. Our balcony strawberries, tomatoes and chili peppers are growing, as is my general contentment with life. Summer always fills me with an extra bit of joy and energy, it's so wonderful to have long, long days filled with light and warmth that you can't help but feel cheerful! :)

4 years of Rag Pets

It's been four years today since I made the very first Rag Pet as a present for my best friend's daughter on her naming day. (You can see Molly, the first ever rag-cat here: photo!) These four years have really just flown by, and even after all this time, I'm still loving making Rag Pets and my love and appreciation of soft toys has grown all the greater too.

I think I'm not even a year old in this photo, taken by my dad. My grandmother made both me and my brother a pair of teddybears when we were born, and I do believe that my lifelong love of soft toys got started then and there! Gran also taught me to sew when I was about six years old, so I could make my own soft toys and she wouldn't have to hop behind the sewing machine every time I came up with an idea for a toy I wanted.

As a kid, when all my friends would push about baby dolls in their toy prams, I would proudly cart around a soft toy in mine, and I slept with so many soft toys in my bed that it was a wonder I fitted in there among them at all! Then, in my late teens – early twenties I believed that I was much too grown up for soft toys, yet I still slept with a little stuffed cow I had made for myself. I would have been mortified had anyone found that out though.
Now, in my thirties, I've come to the conclusion that you're never too old for anything you enjoy and once again hold my head up high amongst my plushies and I'm proud to be a toy maker.

I'm going to be making Rag Pets and soft toys for many, many years yet to come, and I hope that I can share the love for soft toys with many, many people all over the world! :)

Foresty fabric everywhere!

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to vote on which theme I should go with for my PlushYou! pieces! With all the votes tallied, "Forest" came out on top (with "Circus" a close second) and even though I change my mind as often as I change my pants, I'll be sticking with this theme now. :)

I've made sketches and made my mind up as to names and now all I need to do is pick what fabrics to use...

I'd never say that I have too much fabric, quite the contrary, I think I never have just the fabric I need, but at times it is a little hard to pick only a few fabrics from the piles of plenty. I have already managed to prune my assortment a bit though, and I'm sure it will all come together in the end, especially since I have a pretty clear image in my mind of what I'm wanting to do.
And I always have BooBoo at hand to help me with things too.

(BooBoo isn't actually very much of a help, laking thumbs and getting hair on everything and all, but she's super cute, so it all balances out.)