Ode to E-Tower Homies – maddie

Bunny, Penguin, Cat

These are the completed stuffed animals for my project :)) For my final project, I made stuffed animals for the three closest friends I have made this semester in my dorm. Since we are all splitting up after this semester, in the sense that we won’t live in the same building, I decided to make these as a thank you and parting gift for the end of the semester.

These were the models that I made in experimentation process. For the heads, the original patterns I made turned out pretty well. For the final versions, I just made minor adjustments to the width of the cat head and the size of the bunny ears. For the bodies, I had to make many adjustments to how I sewed them together. I originally planned to have four panels and then one circle on the bottom, but that ended up making a weird indent and corners at the top, so I tried making four panels and a circle/oval for top and bottom. I also experimented with adjusting the dimensions of the body to make them more proportional to the heads. The last adjustment I tried was making the head/body out of two panels instead of four by cutting the pattern on a folded edge.

I think that the cat came out most like my original sketch for the design. I intended for it to look like a simple, recognizable orange cat. For this stuffy, I made the head using four panels. I sewed the two halves together of the face together and pressed the seams, then sewed the front and back together, then stuffed it. For the body, I used two panels and then two ovals to make a more tube like structure and then stuffed it. For the tail, I just cut two wavy rectangles and sewed them together then stuffed it and attached it to the body. Since the head didn’t have an oval at the bottom, it didn’t quite fit on the body, so it looks a little bit like it is slouching. Finally, I added face details with embroidery and used iron on adhesive to attach the ears. My biggest challenge with this stuffed animal was making the head and body proportional to each other because originally, the head was much wider and it looked weird.

The penguin, initially, was challenging to design the pattern because I wanted to have more of the v shape at the top of the face, but after trying many times, I decided it was too difficult. After changing the pattern to just have a flat top, it was very quick to sew the final product and add the nose and details since this was just one blob while the other two stuffed animals were ~3 blobs. I think that I would have wanted to make this slightly bigger but I didn’t have enough fabric to scale it up.

The bunny is definitely my favorite out of the three. My original intention was to make the bunny out of plain white muslin fabric, but I decided to experiment with color blocking instead and used three shades of orange/red to make an alternating pattern.

In my model, I didn’t really like the way I had connected the ears so I tried sewing them into the head before flipping it inside out, but I couldn’t figure it out without changing the pattern completely, so I had to stick with the original way. I finished the final details with embroidery, but I think I preferred the bunny before I added a face. Then I made an orange pom pom and attached it to the back as a fluffy tail.

I am very happy with the way that these turned out and I hope that my friends like them!