Making your own Stuffed Toy

It’s been rather cold and raining a lot lately so for this month’s activity, we’re making our own stuffed toys to cuddle and line along our workstations at the studio. These are the fruits of our  .. err… hard work, and here’s how you can make one for yourself.  But before that, let’s gather the following materials first: Cloth (size depends on your design) Sewing Machine (a great help but not necessary) Needle Thread (same color as your cloth) Tailor’s chalk (or if one is not available, you could probably use a pencil or any other marker that doesn’t leave a permanent mark) Scissors Fillings (could be cotton, discarded cloth, or whatever you prefer to use, we used fillings of an old pillow) Buttons Yarn Miscellaneous materials (depending on your design) Now that our materials are ready, we’ll proceed to drawing an original design for our stuffed toy. It could be an animal, an adorable alien, a cute caricature of a loved one, or anything you want. When the designs are done, we’ll move on to the next step – creating the outline of the toy. To do this, we’ll get a strip of cloth and draw our design on it using the tailor’s chalk. Then we’ll get a pair of scissors and start cutting around the edges of the design. Don’t forget that our stuffed toys will have front and back parts so we either have to make two identical cuts or we could fold the cloth in half with the upper portion serving as the front part and the lower portion serving as the back part before cutting around the edges. When we’re done with the outline, we’ll get the sewing machine and sew the edges together to seal them off, leaving only a small opening where we could insert the fillings to give the toy a proper form. If you’re not familiar with the use of a sewing machine, you can probably consult a sewer or sewing machine manual, or you can choose not to use one altogether and stick with an ordinary needle instead. This is going to take a lot longer, though, so it depends on which option you are more comfortable with. Next, we’ll stuff the toys with the fillings we prepared until they’re plump enough. If some parts are still sagging, we could use bamboo or Popsicle sticks to give them additional support. We’ll then close the remaining opening off using a threaded needle. After that, we’ll breathe some life unto them by adding more details like eyes, hair, hands, feet, or whatever our design requires. For the eyes, we can use a pair of buttons, for the hair, strands of yarn put in place with the help of a needle or glue will do. We can also add in some clothes and accessories by using strips of cloth, paper, carton, plastic or whatever material is applicable and cutting it according to the shape we want then attaching it to the...

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