Rag Pets

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.)

Oh hello there!

It's been a while since I last popped by here, but I'm trying not to feel bad about not blogging all that often. Tartx has a really great post about blogging without obligation: http://www.tartx.com/blog/?page_id=233 and it's a philosophy I fully support. I don't want this blog that's so very dear to me to become something of a burden, and I don't want to have to churn out posts if I don't have a reason to post.

This post does have a reason, and that reason is a super one: I'm going to be exhibiting at PlushYou! in Seattle this fall! I'm really chuffed to be a part of the show again, and to get to share my work with the world. :)

I'm famously bad at making decisions; I will take forever to pick what to eat at a restaurant, and then change my mind once more while I'm ordering and choosing what to wear can take ages and many a wardrobe change before I make it out the door, wishing I would have worn something else instead. So I'm hoping you lot would be able to help me to make up my mind as to what theme I should go with for my pieces. To that end, here's a little poll:

a) circus
b) forest
c) space

Leave a comment with your vote as to which theme would be best, I'll tally up the results, and hope not to change my mind too many times over! :)

The making of a super hero

Edgar is coming along, slowly but surely.
I'm having great fun working on him, although Edgar-work is occasionally punctuated by other projects and things that need doing, so he's not progressing super quickly. Still, I get to be the comics geek I am and I'm trying out some new things while I'm at it!

Edgar is the first Rag Pet to get safety eyes. I'd been looking for little safety eyes for ages and was lucky enough to finally find some, measuring a tiny 4,5 mm, through 6060 on Etsy (who I thoroughly recommend to everyone needing safety eyes of any size). I like the, umh... well, professional look safety eyes give and how easy, if a bit of a pain in the fingers, they are to pop in.
I also got some new polyfill at my local fabric store, expecting it to be that kind of crunchy, rough sort since it was really cheap, but it turned out to be lovely and soft with a great loft instead! Edgar now has some of this new polyfill padding his rag innards a bit.

Mr Edwards, aka. Super Elephant, like all great super heroes from Spiderman to Batman, is of course making his own costume. :)

Stay tuned for more Edgar Edwards, mild mannered office worker by day, Super Elephant by night — same Rag-time, same Rag-channel!

perhaps, maybe, possibly

I firmly believe that there is nothing that's impossible if you just try, and that there are no sorrier words than "could have been". So, with that, I've decided to try my luck and I'm going to submit an article to Stuffed Magazine in the hopes that it might get published.

I'm going to make a very special rag-elephant for my submission, as you can see bellow.

(Click on the image to see it better.)

I still need to get a few bits and bobs yet, but here's some of the fabrics I'm planning on using for Edgar:

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I sometimes find it hard to come by the motivation to work, but I'm really excited about getting Edgar put together! It's nice to have a real purpose for the Rag Pets I make, instead of them just ending up sitting in the living room bookcase waiting for the day I get my shop done. I've also had the idea of a superhero Rag Pet -being a bit of a comics & superheroes geek myself- rolling around my head for a long while now, so it's super to have a special something to make it for. And of course it would be absolutely awesome to have my work published in Stuffed!
Onward and upward! :)

To the future!

Now that we've entered a new year, and a new decade at that, it's time to look into the future. I've lots of plans for this year, both big ones and little ones, and it's exciting to have a new, shiny year ahead of me.

I occasionally find it hard to muster up the energy and motivation to do things and I was a little disappointed in how little I got done last year. So, in an effort to keep creating and to get things done this year, I made myself a chart to keep a log of all the days I do something creative, be it sewing, taking photos, drawing or even making a quick doodle to jot down an idea. Every day I create, I get to colour in on my chart and I hope it will be a riot of colour with nary a white square to be seen by the end of the year!

I'm also thinking about the future of Rag Pets, and I truly hope to finally get a shop up and running this year, our bookcase is fairly bursting with Rag Pets eager to move to new homes!
I also just re-drew my base Rag Pet pattern, the old one was in rather bad shape after years of use. While at it, I thought about trying something similar I did with the rag-snowflakes, and maybe drawing patterns for Rag Pets completely freehand. I really liked the sketch-like, more organic looking quality doing patterns that way gives and it's something I'd like to translate to the rest of my work too.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of this year and what it might bring!

It's Giveaway Day again!

This is Flakey the rag-snowflake. He's an unique little snowflake at about 22 cm tall.
Flakey made out of soft snowy white flannel and his nose is appliqued stripy blue cotton. He has little button eyes and he's wearing snuggly cotton gingham pyjamas with mother-of-pearl buttons on the back.
Flakey is filled with rags and wool.

Since going to bed early makes Santa come quicker, Flakey has donned his PJs and is going to sleep now in order to make the presents come faster!

To celebrate the spirit of Christmas and the joy of giving I'm taking part in Giveaway Day, and thus I'm giving Flakey the rag-snowflake away to one lucky person who leaves a comment on what they enjoy most about Christmas here on this entry between today and the 6th of December (that's our Independence Day here in Finland!). Every commenter will be assigned a number, with the first person to comment being number 1 and the second commenter would be number 2 and so forth, and then on the 6th, I'll randomly draw a number to see who Flakey will be going home to (I'm happy to ship internationally, so it doesn't matter where you live).

Check out the whole long, long, long list of other wonderful crafters participating in Giveaway Day, too, they're all listed at the Sew Mama Sew-blog!

The best thing about Christmas for me is the decorations, I put up my Christmas lights up yesterday while listening to Christmas songs and I'm really looking forward to getting a real Christmas tree to decorate again. I buy a few new Christmas tree decorations every year, with most of them being bird-related in some way.
I do like Christmas music a lot too, and I tend to listen to it pretty much every day come December. Oh, and Christmas food! I love Christmas food! Joulutortut (Christmas tarts) and glögi (mulled wine) and porkkanalaatikko (carrot casserole) are at the top of my list of things I want to eat at Christmas. :)

Added on the 6th of December:
Commenting is closed now, and a winner has been picked. Thank you so much to everyone who commented, you've made this a super giveaway!

Lights, camera, photos!

Despite yesterday being yet another bleak, cloudy day, I managed to squeeze taking photos of my Luv-able + Hug-able quintet in between gaps in the clouds. BooBoo, my photographic assistant, helped me with setting up the photo shoot and she kept me company as I bemoaned the lack of light. PhotoShop helped heaps too, since I had to use a mix of natural light and indoor light, the lighting was a little off and the pictures required a bit of tweaking to get the whites white again.
I did my best to make do with what meager daylight we got and I lit all the lamps I could, but I could have still done with more light. So, I was wondering if any of you have any tips on how to cope with darkening days and lack of light when taking photos?

Speaking of light, we finally got ceiling lights for our living room yesterday! It was about time too; we've been living here for three years and only now got around to getting lamps and having them hung. I know that lamps are a small, rather silly thing to be happy about, but I'm still super happy to have them. :)

Things to come

For some reason I thought I'd already mentioned this in my previous entry, but it would seem that the flu (which is still bothering me) addled my brain and I didn't. So, I'm happy to now tell you that I'll be exhibiting in the Luv-able & Hug-able show at Gallery Hanahou in New York this winter! The theme this year is "Medium and Mini", with works ranging in size from plushies perfect for hugging to teeny tiny little plushies. The show will open on the 3rd of December and it will run until January 9th, so if you happen to be in New York during that time, please go visit the gallery!

Here's a little sneak peek at what I'll be making for the show:

I'm super excited to be a part of this, knowing that my plushies will be on show in one of my most favourite cities and in awesome company too! Among the artists exhibting this year is one of my most favourite plush-artists, Christina Gordon of Jamfancy. I've been a great big fan of her work for ages, so it's very cool to have my plushies rubbing shoulders with hers, as it were. :)

Yarn Saturday

Now, I know it's not technically Saturday anymore, but for me, the day doesn't change until I've slept and it's morning again. And I'm sure it's still Saturday somewhere in the world.

Easter Saturday is called "Lanka Lauantai" in Finnish, which translates into "Yarn Saturday". Traditionally, the yarn produced during the winter was washed during Holy Saturday, hence the fun alliterative name for this particular day.
I had no yarn to wash, but I did sew all day today, which is also why I'm a bit late in posting this. I just got into that blissful sewing groove where there's nothing else but you and the sewing machine and the needle & thread doing their magic. I've been sewing pretty much all my life, and I am still amazed how a few pieces of fabric and some thread can turn into anything and everything you can imagine.

In this case, what those pieces of fabric and streams of thread have turned into is an Easter bunny, who will be properly introduced to you tomorrow when I've had time to take her photos. :)