Early Cuyler Plush

My sister is a big fan of the Adult Swim show Squidbillies. Her favorite character is of course, Early Cuyler. Knowing this, her fiance and I conspired to make a plush Early for her birthday.

I did some research both to get an idea of his facial expressions, and an idea on how to construct him.  I came across vikangaroo, who had made a custom plush Early too. I got a better idea of how to construct his head, but decided to go with my floppy tentacles and to use different techniques for the face.

Here he is all stuffed. I'm using my hat to get an approximate measure for his head, so that I could make his hat.  Also this is before his mouth was embroidered.



I actually really like him like this, he's almost like a Clockwork Orange octopi.


And here is the finished piece with hat and his mouth sewn on:



My sister loved it! And a few weeks later when we both went up to my parents, Early came up with her. He road shotgun all the way to PA from NC, telling everyone along the way, "Don't touch the triiim!".

Long time no post!

Its been a long time since I last posted.  Life got busy and my little blog, and my crafts, got pushed to the side.  My dad has been a sick for about a year with congestive heart failure. Luckily he was approved to be included in the trials for a new procedure to replace a heart valve (A calcified valve was the cause of his problem). He went through the surgery and did great!  Even the doctors were really impressed with how quickly he recovered, and  how quickly you saw the difference in him.  Its amazing, like someone just turned on a switch and gave him his energy back. We're all so happy, and now that he's feeling like his old self again, I can worry less and focus more on crafts and planning for my upcoming wedding.

As for wedding stuff, I'm planning on making a separate blog for that, mainly as a way to teach myself wordpress. I'm a designer by day, and I'd really like to add that among my list of capabilities.  Though I'm sure any wedding crafts I find and do will be cross-posted to this blog as well.

Like I said, because of all the real life business, I haven't had much time to create things, but I do have a few things to share once I take some photographs and wrap up a few loose ends.  One of those things is a pattern I came up with to enter into Spoonflower's Weekly Fabric Contest. The theme this time was "Squid". Designing repeating patterns has been on my list of "want to do" forever, so I really was happy to get to play around and come up with something.  I used a little doodle I had made a while back as the basis for my pattern and cleaned it up in Illustrator. Going back and forth between Illustrator for drawing and Photoshop for creating the offset repeat block, I came up with...



I really like how it turned out, and regardless of where it places in the contest I think I'll make it available for sale. I definitely want to order a few yards for myself to make some things, maybe some wallets or clutches.  If you'd like to vote this, or other fabulous squid-themed fabrics, head over to the Spoonflower Squid Fabric Contest page.

Working on pattern design was something new to me and I must say it was a whole lot of fun.  I'm excited to work on more pattern designs in the future. Currently I'm working on my entry for another upcoming fabric design contest, Project Selvage.  The overall winner will get a licensing contract with Michael Miller fabrics.  How neat is that?!  Although I would be stoked just to make it into the semi-finalist round. The deadline is March 24, so I need to get crackin'!