A Little Demon Will Do!

As much as a vampire, a Frankenstein monster and a mummy are entrenched as the ultimate symbols of Halloween, a devil or a demon is usually used to fill out the seasonal lineup of characters. I wanted to use one of the little, red, horned guys because I thought it would be relatively easy to make (right now I’m all about easy to do!!!) and because I always enjoy a good story or movie with them as the villains. Of course, once I saw Shawn’s design for the pillow I definitely wanted to do it!

This pillow is pretty much all Shawn’s idea from design to color choices. The concept was sketched out in that Starbucks café, and after thinking about it I decided to change it a little by doing a skull and crossbones with the face only use pitchforks underneath the devil’s head. I sketched out the idea in a small sketchbook and thought it would work. My devil ended up looking more like a regular ole demon, but I figured that would fit in just as well so I started drawing all the separate pieces. I did the head, the horn, the eyes, the mouth, the ears and the pitchfork. Before I cut them out, I moved onto the two different flame drawings and got completely and utterly stuck!! I couldn’t for the life of me draw anything that looked like fire….even with a smaller, second version to add depth. I tried and erased and tried again and erased again, but to no avail. I got so frustrated with it that when I started to work on it Saturday morning to begin sewing, I had Shawn draw the fire for me!! First drawing out was absolutely fantastic, so I knew I made the right decision. One day, I’ll have to do it for myself but I needed to get going on this pillow so I could get another one finished. Perfecting it on my own will have to come later.I now had everything I needed, so on to the pattern and fabric cutting. I started work on the demon’s face first and assembled all my parts together. I ended up doing the beard without a pattern and had to do it a couple of times before I liked the result. I then sewed everything for it together except the mouth. I wasn’t crazy about the way it looked, and I was sitting at the table staring at it when Shawn came over. He helped me pare it down a bit to make it smaller and a tad thinner. The result was definitely more menacing than the one I had done. The last touch was the little teeth which were a pain to work with for sure!

Next were the two different flames. Shawn had done the drawing for both on the same piece of paper, so I traced the big one onto another one and cut the small one out of the original. These were difficult to deal with too, both in the pattern and the fabric, because of all the twists and turns in the shape. It was particularly hard to cut those curves in the fleece since it stretches and shifts so much more than the felt. But, I got them done and they looked awesome! (It was around here that I cut the pitchfork out and realized that it just wasn’t going to work, so I ditched it and went with Shawn’s original idea.) I was a little concerned that maybe the colors on those flames should have been reversed so the darker was on the outside. Given that red was going to be used for the demon, Shawn had gone with as much contrast as possible in using the two other colors associated with fire. However, I usually think of red first when I picture fire so I was wondering if the darker orange would have worked better on the outside. I have to say though that the progression of light to dark or vice versa is rather striking. It definitely catches the eye, and with the way he drew the flames the whole thing gives the impression that this column of fire has just gone WHOOSH!! with the demon’s head popping out. So, I stopped worrying about it…..for the most part. : )

Let me tell you, and I’ll be quite blunt, stuffing this thing was a real bitch. Trying to get into the individual flame peaks was so freaking hard! My thought was to stuff those first, so I got my handy-dandy chopstick tool and started pushing the polyfil in. After that, I began stuffing the main part of the pillow but found that I couldn’t get the two parts to combine. I ended up with flame peaks that had a depression in the pillow where it met the rest of it and were a bit floppy. I didn’t like that at all, so I took the polyfil back out, and ripped it apart since it had gotten mashed together by the chopstick into these kind of tightly-packed pieces. In pushing at the fabric when I turned it inside out and during the first stuffing run, I had poked the really small peak on the right so much that a small hole had developed. I had to sew that up before I could start all over. Once I did that, I began again only this time pushing the stuffing into the center of the pillow first. I took the chopstick tool as well as my finger and worked some of it into the flame peaks, shifting everything around so there would be polyfil right behind each part to puff those areas where the peaks and rest of the pillow met. This worked out much better. I couldn’t get any stuffing into the very tips of some of those flame peaks and not at all for a couple, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Everything kept its shape well enough and I was happy with the end result. I still have to work on closing up the hole though, but luckily I planned ahead and kept it at the bottom so the puckering isn’t as noticeable.