Ultros from FFVI

Finished Ultros!  He's the octopus from Final Fantasy VI I've been working on this week.  He ended up measuring about 3 feet in length.

I never made a plush completely from fleece, but man is it forgiving fabric!  I could even use his legs as pincushions and the holes just disappeared when I took out the pins.  He has a polar fleece body, legs and eyelids.  His teeth are 3 inches long made of felt.

The eyes were a bit tricky.  I couldn't find the right colors anywhere, so I had to customize my own safety eyes.  It's not too difficult.  I know of two ways to customize eyes.  One, if you need a black pupil you can just get clear safety eyes and paint the backs of them before applying them to the plush.  With these eyes I needed a red pupil, so I had to customize full black eyes.  I bought the largest I could find (60mm), painted them with acrylics and sealed them with clear nail polish.  The polish just needs to be applied to completely dry paint, then left for a day to dry thoroughly.  It creates a hard protective cover coat, doesn't chip easily, and makes a glassy look without the high price of buying acrylic sealant at the hobby store.  These eyes took six coats of paint (yellow on black is a nightmare) and three coats of polish.

 I honestly think he turned out amazing!  Here's the picture that I had to work with:

Hand sewing this took a while, though.  Glad I'll be getting my new sewing machine soon!!!  On that note::

KICKSTARTER UPDATE!

I met my $500 goal in ONE day!  It's amazing!  I didn't know people would love my plushies so much, but I'm honored they do.  It's truly what I want to do with my career, and launching this business means so much to me.  It will help me do something I love, as well as help support my three beautiful babies!  My husband is so supportive as well :)

My next goal is $1200.  Seems like a bit of a stretch (more than double what I wanted initially) but with 11 days left, I'm already over $900!!  With that extra $700 I could go to my first professional craft show and do business face to face with customers.  It would do WONDERS for my business!  That amount would cover rental fees, display cases, material for product, and transportation.  Here's to hoping!

And a braggy mom moment to end this post:

My twins rockin their chuck taylors! They will be four months old on the 23rd. Hard to imagine!  Also hard to imagine their brother will be 2 next month!!

Nintendo Cross Stitchery

I've been pretty busy lately with projects, and cleaning out the house.  We had a garage sale that went REALLY well, so I got some play money and decided to invest in a program called PC Stitch 10.  It's essentially a cross stitching pattern creator.  You can import pictures in, and it will tell you the DMC colors you need and give you a pattern.  I, of course, can never take the easy way... so I made a pattern from scratch!

My son received a Winnie the Pooh cross stitched birth record as a gift when he was born, but unfortunately for the twins they didn't.  No one was really up to making two (and I don't blame them, cross stitching can be a pain in the ... foot).  I'm redecorating the kid's room (and our living room) into video game themes, so I figured I'd stick with it when I went to make the pattern for their birth record.  This took about four hours of learning the program inside and out, but I finished it for the most part!

There are a couple things I want to change, maybe some spacer lines between the alphabet, numbers and birth information.  But overall I love it and think it's adorable.  I'm really looking forward to polishing this up a bit more and actually cross stitching it for my girls.  I'm thinking of making one Peach and one Daisy for the twins, and maybe making a Mario one for my son.  It would look super cute in their rooms in a row!

I have a couple of others I'm playing with for the moment.  If I get good enough I'll post a few on my Etsy.  Some of these would look super cute framed in an embroidery hoop.