Rag Pets

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! :)

The autumn "blahs"

I've got the "blahs", which are like the blues, but less sad and more just a simple lack of enthusiasm and energy. The blahs cause a lot of moping about wearing your PJs all day long, wanting to snuggle under a blanket and cravings for chocolate. I know it's all down the dwindling light and the seemingly constant drizzle that makes everything drab and wet. This season just doesn't agree with me, even if I do love the beauty of "ruska" (there isn't an english word for this, it means the the colourful time when the leaves turn) which has been especially splendid this year, getting to wear a lot of layers and drinking lots of hot coco.

I've finished my pieces for Luv-able & Hug-able, but I'm having a hard time taking photos of them, since there's precious little light now with the days getting shorter and shorter, and the dreary weather doesn't help one bit either. I don't think I've seen the sun make even a brief appearance these past few days.
I had a rather unsuccessful photo shoot today, which admittedly didn't do much to improve my already blah mood. I hope to have better luck getting pictures of my snowy quintet tomorrow. I really enjoyed making these five plushies; I decided to do something a little different and I'm happy with how it all turned out and I'm eager to get to show them off now!

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. :)

Something different

I'm working on something new and it's all rather exhilarating! It's fun to get to stretch your creative muscles and to do something different every now and then. And what better time for new things than spring!

Spring always gets my energy up and sparkling. It's how everything is new again, and how there's so, so much more light than during the dark, drab winter. There's still snow on the ground here, but that doesn't matter since we had no snow last winter and this year winter actually feels like winter with snow and bitterly cold days and all. The snow makes the air sparkle during brilliant, cold days and it's a bit like living inside a giant crystal.
Still, I'm eager for spring to come. I've missed the sun during the winter (it would hardly rise at all before it already begun to set), and as I'm prone to come down with SAD in the dark months, it's like I'm now beginning to wake after a long sleep. I've come to the conclusion that I must be solar powered! :)

Any ways, I'm working on a new kind of Rag Pet, something a little different that I've taken to calling "Print Pets". I designed and drew and PhotoShopped all of yesterday and now I'm waiting for my test swatch to come from Spoonflower (if you're not familiar with them, it's a brilliant service that lets you design & print your own fabrics), eager to see how everything will turn out. It's nice to have a new project in the works! :)

WIP Wednesday

As you've probably guessed from the picture above, I'm expanding the rag-menagerie with a fox, and said fox is turning out super cute so far, even if I do say so myself. :)

I like coming up with new species of Rag Pets, drafting tails and ears, and trying out which type of nose will be best for each animal and so on. I think getting the ears right is my favourite part of the whole process, and I really like sewing & pressing them too. And it's not just different species that will be issuing forth from my sewing machine; I'm also designing different types of rag-cats from tabbies to siamese, and I'm planning different rag-dogs (I've only made the one rag-dog so far, so it's about time!) too.

The design of the Rag Pets has evolved a bit since the first ever rag-cat I made way back when. I swapped embroidered eyes for tiny little buttons when I found some at a local craft store (I should go back and stock up on them, really) and I changed the design of the nose from a tirangle to a much simpler Y, T or X shape -depending on the species- last summer. The Terrific Trio were the first Rag Pets to get tails, and since them, I've had great fun with rag-tails.
I'm sure the Rag Pets will continue to evolve a lot yet... I quite like to think of myself as a rag-Darwin! :)

Stuff about stuffing

As Winnie is showing in the above photo, that's more or less how much rags goes into each rag pet, in addition to a big lump of cotton batting. It's about one single bed sized sheet or half of a regular sized duvet cover, ripped to shreds. The older and more worn the sheets the better, I prefer the ones that are so worn you can almost see through them! They're so lovely and soft and they make the best stuffing. I get a lot of my old bedclothes from family and if I'm running short, I nip to the flea market for more. If the sheets have a very cool pattern, I save a bit to use for rag pet clothes.

I do most all of the ripping on the balcony, since it makes a lot of dust and doing it indoors just means more dusting and vacuuming afterwards. I'd love to have some machine that'd do the ripping for me, since it's pretty tedious work to tear a big sheet to shreds and I'm pretty sure my lungs disagree with all that dust too. We did try using a paper shredder, but since fabric isn't as stiff as paper, it didn't quite work. I've also tried to find "shoddy" (shredded recycled fabric) online, but the smallest lot I've managed to find was 5 tons, and while it'd be super to have that much stuffing at hand, I'm afraid we don't have anywhere to store it! If anyone should know of a place that sells shoddy in small lots, I'd love to hear of it.

Nekkid pets

Don't worry, the Terrific Trio aren't chilled, it was nice and warm the day this photo was taken so they had no trouble lounging on the sofa nekkid as the day I made them. :)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't much like stuffing. It's hard work and it takes up the most time in the whole rag pet making process. One thing that makes stuffing a bit more bearable is watching telly while doing it. Due to this I've gotten addicted to day-time TV and have thus discovered that Oprah and Dr. Phil are perfect companions to stuffing. I've also developed an addiction to audiobooks, because they allow me to combine two of my favourite things: sewing and reading. I'm currently listening my way through "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer and I'm liking it a lot so far, the reader is really good. I go through about a book per week (if it's a long book) and I'm eternally grateful for LibriVox, my main fix for my audiobook needs.

An other thing that makes stuffing easier is that I got some gorgeous organic cotton stuffing from NearSea Naturals a while back. It's really lovely and soft, yet there's a nice "firmness" to it, and I know this might sound silly, but it smells absolutely lovely too! And you don't need to use as much of it as you would ordinary, cheap-o polyfill, since the cotton has less air fluffing it up. The Terrific Trio are the first rag pets to have the new cotton stuffing inside of them.