I wasn’t sure what to make for Anne that would be specific to her likes and interests. I was hesitant to go with what seemed like obvious ones such as her love of dinosaurs or books/the library because I wanted it to be a little different and maybe unexpected. However, I ended up not doing that at all and went with BOTH of those ideas instead! : ) Am I a cop out? Perhaps, but the result was so incredibly adorable that I don’t really care!!
In coming up with the sketch for my dinosaur, I intended to use a stuffed animal that I purchased earlier this year as a model. I figured if I could render it well enough, I could possibly use that drawing as the basis for how I wanted his character to look in a children’s story I wrote. But, when I sketched him without the stuffed animal in front of me, it came out looking nothing like him. It actually ended up looking like a water dinosaur, and I liked the result so I decided to go with it. He’s no longer a water dinosaur, however, because when I actually cut out the pattern for his flippers and attached them to his body they ended up looking like feet. So the water dinosaur came onto land!
I made the pattern small because Anne is crazy over tiny things. I knew I’d never be able to pull off making him incredibly tiny, so I used the sketch I drew as the pattern since it was definitely smaller than most plushes but big enough that it seemed doable. This one required a little bit of thought on my part given the fact that there was a head, a body which was curved, and a tail. I wasn’t sure exactly how to do the pattern. Do I do it all as one shape or do I do it in sections? If I did the former, it seemed like an incredible undertaking to try to make it all one piece to then work with and turn inside out. However, if I did the latter I’d have to mentally cut each part of him down the middle and then lay that flat to use as my pattern. That is something I’m not at all good at doing!! In the interest of making things less complicated for myself as well as not creating more work, I decided to give the one-piece pattern a try. I inked my original sketch to keep and then traced over it. I then cut that out and laid it on another piece of paper to outline the outside shape. I flipped it over and laid the reverse one a little space apart from the first and outlined that shape . I now had a possible pattern to use for the entire dinosaur as one piece! I tried it out in felt first to see if it would work, and it actually came out spectacularly.Let me tell you, stuffing something as small as his feet and tail was definitely not easy. When I purchased another bag of stuffing, it came with a “stuffing tool” which was essentially a wooden chopstick. Believe me, I used the heck out of that thing!!! I worked on the feet first and then sewed them to the body. (I wouldn’t notice until after I finished him that they were a little too low on the body to splay out separately from each other.) I then turned it inside out and sewed him up, leaving a section open to stuff. I reversed him, stuffed him and sewed him up. That was where I made my second mistake. I forgot to do the eyes and mouth before I sewed him up, so the knots would now be on the outside rather than nicely hidden. I finished him by putting the needle for the eyes and the mouth on one side and pushing them through to the other side, lining it up the best I could to match. I also pulled the thread tight when I did the eyes to give an indented look to them.
Once I was done, I wasn’t completely happy with him but I thought she’d probably like him and quite frankly I was tired and couldn’t bear the notion of starting all over again. One morning on the way to work, I told Shawn I was trying to come up with a clever name for my dinosaur. We went back and forth on it, working off each other’s ideas, until finally Shawn came up with using biblio and thus Bibliosaurus was born. It was sheer genius and I loved it immediately!! It was the perfect name for Anne’s gift. With that name, I then wondered how we could find or make tiny glasses to perch on his nose. Luckily, I found some on Etsy that looked like they would work. (My dinosaur’s head is considerably smaller than most dolls, so I didn’t find any that seemed to fit on doll/miniature sites.) I thought I was finished with the whole thing, and just had to wait for those glasses to come in the mail. However, that nagging feeling of dissatisfaction with him kept haunting me. The glasses came, and it was then that I decided to do the Bibliosaurus over again from the start.This time, I changed the pattern a bit so I could have one side of the legs as part of the body pattern. I pinned the leg pattern to the part of the body one where I thought a leg looked best, cut out the body and leg then did that over again for the remaining three. I then cut out four more legs to place on top of those and sew together. I hoped this might make the process easier as well as creating a less cramped look to the legs. I also drew dots to outline the eyes and mouth on both sides of the head and sewed those before I even stuffed it. I wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat that mistake again.
By this time, it was a Friday and I determined to finish the whole thing that night because I really wanted to mail them out the next day. (Unfortunately, that didn’t happen so I had to wait until this past Monday after work.). Around midnight or so I completed him by sewing the little glasses onto his nose, placing them down far enough so he’d have that stereotypical librarian look.
I’m not sure I pulled off the less cramped look to his feet, but it did give it a slightly different appearance. The first one though could actually stand without being propped up. By doing the eyes and mouth the way that I did on the second one, I wasn’t able to achieve the indented look of the first one and they ended up being bigger which I’m not sure I liked. However, the mouth synced up perfectly on the second one. I also ended up liking the tail better on the first one but the stomach on the second was more rounded. All in all, I’m not sure I improved upon it but instead just made two different versions. I definitely wasn’t going to try it again, so sent the second one to Anne and kept the first sans glasses for myself.
I came up with a general idea for Jerzy relatively quickly. If you’re an Art & Story listener, this won’t be news to you but he has a particular passion for sound effects. Jerzy spends a good deal of time and thought into figuring out what kind of sound effects to use for his comics, how the sound would be spelled out, what kind of color it would be and whether there would be any other effect necessary (like gradients, waviness to the lines, if a certain part of the sound has more emphasis, etc.) He jokes that this makes him a nerd, and it does : ), but it also makes for a more interesting experience when you read his comics. (Below is the original Zorch!.)
Given this passion, I thought I would make a pillow-like plush with various sound effects from his graphic novel, The Front, sewn on top of it. I could use different colors and sizes, picking out ones that were specific to his characters so it could be a cacophony of sounds at a glance. I started making a list, but when I discussed it with Shawn he suggested I concentrate on Zorch! for his main character, Thirsty. This was a better idea because it was much more focused and possibly more personal. I thought I could do a lightning bolt of sorts on top of the pillow since Thirsty expends energy as his super power and then sew the letters on top of that. However, I wasn’t thinking visually enough because Shawn suggested I do the pillow in that type of shape to begin with. I loved this idea since it would be another facet to represent the sound effect, which I figured would appeal to Jerzy that much more. We ended up tweaking the idea a bit by changing the lightning bolt-type shape to something more symbolic of an energy burst. Now the question became…..what color(s)?Shawn suggested green because he had heard Jerzy say that was his favorite color, but I told him that I was thinking more blue and white since that’s what he had done in his graphic novel. Shawn looked at me for a second and then pointed out that The Front was in black and white. I told him nuh-uh and immediately went to get our copy to show him. I opened it up to discover that he was indeed right! Where had I come up with blue and white then? It’s possible that I was influenced by the fact that the front and back cover of the graphic novel are in color, and it shows that Thirsty’s skin is light blue. However, I prefer to think that I was inspired by Jerzy’s sound effect and grafted my own idea onto his image of Thirsty’s power and the corresponding Zorch!. It would only serve to add another layer to his sound effect pillow. The final nuance to the whole project was drawing the letters as close as I could to how Jerzy had them in his comic.
Once I started working with the fabric, I cut out my letters first which went much quicker this time because I only needed one layer of fabric and I didn’t have to stuff them. I cut out the base of the pillow and then arranged the letters on top to see how it would basically look in the end. There seemed to be something missing, so I showed it to Shawn and asked if there needed to be another color between the letters and the base to give it depth. He agreed. I already had the lighter blue from Mark’s project, so I cut out a smaller version of the base and that made it pop more.
I’m not sure the shape really gives the impression of an energy wave. I actually think it looks like something else, but I won’t say what because then anyone that sees it will only be able to view it in those terms. I also think I should have stuffed it a little less than I did to make it squishier, but I was afraid if I didn’t then the whole shape and the letters wouldn’t stand out as much. Of course, it’s not meant to be a pillow but……dare I say it…..a piece of art *cringes with self-consciousness* so it probably worked out okay after all. Once again, when it comes right down to it, uniqueness goes a long way and it’s most likely the only plush sound effect out there!!
In trying to figure out what to send to everyone, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do for Mark. One of the things that I love about his work is, of course, his monsters. Who wouldn’t!! But, I do not have the skill to do them justice nor do I have the skill to try and render any of his characters. So, what to do? Aside from his love of metal music and Lee Majors, comics certainly have helped define who he is so I hit upon an idea that I thought might work. What if I made a plush of his website name, CV Comics? Each comic that he does is important to him, but his website as a whole is just as vital and representative of what he values. So, I decided to go for it and that’s what I did.
I wanted to try to bring something from his comics to the project, even if it was just the tiniest nuance, so I attempted to use his 60s style as an influence. Rather than copying a free font that might look the part, I drew each of the letters in a simplistic fashion but tried to make it more interesting than regular block letters. I’m not saying I achieved this, but that was my intent! Some of that intent may have gotten lost in the sewing process, and it could be something I get better at in the future. I also decided to go two-tone with his website name and make the CV part in a warm, somewhat muted blue and the Comics in a warm, golden color. They were somewhat reminiscent of the kind of palette he enjoys using at times, and the two stood out nicely against each other.I drew the letters during my work breaks. Mark helped me out a lot by choosing a name for his site that had three C’s in it! So, that certainly cut down on the sketching part of it as well as the cutting out of the letters. Once I had that completed, the sewing began. I cut and stitched each letter and when that was finished, it made me realize that a plush alphabet would be a great teaching aide for kids. They came out so soft and fun that I bet kids would like to play/learn with them. Of course, I’m sure someone else has thought of this idea as well and there are probably countless sites out there to find such items. It’s definitely something for me to keep in mind because you just never know what people might want and from where.Since I didn’t want to send a jumble of plush letters in a box for little Mark to spell out his website, I sewed the letters together so it would make one giant plush website name. I sewed them together in pairs first, and then sewed each pair to another with the CV going on last atop Comics. It was actually a good thing that I planned to do this because the first “C” I did was for Comics so it was golden, and it ended up looking kind of like a banana. But when you sew it to another letter, you can squish it down and anchor it to hold its shape. Voila, no mistake!! The “V” kind of slants to the right though and I couldn’t fix that as easily, but overall it came out pretty well. At the very least, it’s probably the only plush website name in existence!!
Earlier I mentioned that I was working on a Secret Project, but beyond a couple of vague posts I haven’t written about it again. Well, I finished it maybe a couple weeks ago but ordered an accessory for one of them so had to wait before I could do anything with them. That accessory came, but then I decided I wasn’t completely happy with the last part of it. So I used a couple of work breaks last week and then spent all evening last Friday to finish it.
The Secret Project was three separate gifts for our friends in Ann Arbor: Jerzy Drozd, Anne Drozd and Mark Rudolph. I just wanted to send something homemade their way and did so after work this past Monday. They received it, so now I can blog about the whole thing.
In coming up with the sketch for my dinosaur, I intended to use a stuffed animal that I purchased earlier this year as a model. I figured if I could render it well enough, I could possibly use that drawing as the basis for how I wanted his character to look in a children’s story I wrote. But, when I sketched him without the stuffed animal in front of me, it came out looking nothing like him. It actually ended up looking like a water dinosaur, and I liked the result so I decided to go with it. He’s no longer a water dinosaur, however, because when I actually cut out the pattern for his flippers and attached them to his body they ended up looking like feet. So the water dinosaur came onto land!
I made the pattern small because Anne is crazy over tiny things. I knew I’d never be able to pull off making him incredibly tiny, so I used the sketch I drew as the pattern since it was definitely smaller than most plushes but big enough that it seemed doable. This one required a little bit of thought on my part given the fact that there was a head, a body which was curved, and a tail. I wasn’t sure exactly how to do the pattern. Do I do it all as one shape or do I do it in sections? If I did the former, it seemed like an incredible undertaking to try to make it all one piece to then work with and turn inside out. However, if I did the latter I’d have to mentally cut each part of him down the middle and then lay that flat to use as my pattern. That is something I’m not at all good at doing!! In the interest of making things less complicated for myself as well as not creating more work, I decided to give the one-piece pattern a try. I inked my original sketch to keep and then traced over it. I then cut that out and laid it on another piece of paper to outline the outside shape. I flipped it over and laid the reverse one a little space apart from the first and outlined that shape . I now had a possible pattern to use for the entire dinosaur as one piece! I tried it out in felt first to see if it would work, and it actually came out spectacularly.
Once I was done, I wasn’t completely happy with him but I thought she’d probably like him and quite frankly I was tired and couldn’t bear the notion of starting all over again. One morning on the way to work, I told Shawn I was trying to come up with a clever name for my dinosaur. We went back and forth on it, working off each other’s ideas, until finally Shawn came up with using biblio and thus Bibliosaurus was born. It was sheer genius and I loved it immediately!! It was the perfect name for Anne’s gift. With that name, I then wondered how we could find or make tiny glasses to perch on his nose. Luckily, I found some on Etsy that looked like they would work. (My dinosaur’s head is considerably smaller than most dolls, so I didn’t find any that seemed to fit on doll/miniature sites.) I thought I was finished with the whole thing, and just had to wait for those glasses to come in the mail. However, that nagging feeling of dissatisfaction with him kept haunting me. The glasses came, and it was then that I decided to do the Bibliosaurus over again from the start.
By this time, it was a Friday and I determined to finish the whole thing that night because I really wanted to mail them out the next day. (Unfortunately, that didn’t happen so I had to wait until this past Monday after work.). Around midnight or so I completed him by sewing the little glasses onto his nose, placing them down far enough so he’d have that stereotypical librarian look.
I’m not sure I pulled off the less cramped look to his feet, but it did give it a slightly different appearance. The first one though could actually stand without being propped up. By doing the eyes and mouth the way that I did on the second one, I wasn’t able to achieve the indented look of the first one and they ended up being bigger which I’m not sure I liked. However, the mouth synced up perfectly on the second one. I also ended up liking the tail better on the first one but the stomach on the second was more rounded. All in all, I’m not sure I improved upon it but instead just made two different versions. I definitely wasn’t going to try it again, so sent the second one to Anne and kept the first sans glasses for myself.
