A soft spot for softies

Earlier this year, I made both my housemates Adipose (cutsie little aliens from Dr Who) softies for their birthdays as they both love them and said they wanted them when we were re-watching the episode of Dr Who they feature in. I hadn't made a softie for a while and found I really enjoyed so I made myself a little owl as a prototype of a pattern I was designing.

Tiani's adipose and my little owl spent a while living on the back of an armchair in our living room. Our friend, Hannah, came over one night and admired them. It was only a few weeks until her birthday so I offered to make her the soft toy of her choice. We pulled out my soft toy pattern books and Hannah decided on a bunny, but there wasn't a pattern she liked so I was set the challenge of designing a bunny softie pattern for her. Bunnies are a lot more challenging shape to simplify than owls, but I gave it a go and Mr Bunny is the result.

 I took Mr Bunny to show my crafty workmates as I was quite proud of the way he turned out, which resulted in a commission for me to make another owl for an upcoming baby shower that my workmate was attending. I've previously made large owl softie/cushion/things for a couple of workmates who have had babies and they have been very popular so I adapted that pattern and made a bright blue one (they were having a boy). I was even paid for it, which kinda makes me a professional soft toy maker.

Most recently, I've made a coffee cup plushie (from the chewing gum ad with all the evil food creatures) for Christine. While watching the ad together several times she remarked that she would love a softie of the coffee cup, and when it got close to Christmas and she said it again, I knew what I would be making her for Christmas. The coffee cup plushie is the size of a large takeaway coffee and was a little challenging to design because of the complicated shape of the lid (most of which you can't even see from this angle), but turned out pretty well.

So, the moral to this story is:

Don't mention you would like a plushie, softie, or teddy of something in my vicinity unless you really mean it.