Crafting365; day eight: On my Desk and Dachshunds

Back to your normal toy blog.. at least for a little bit :)

On My Desk
This is what is 'On My Desk' today, the Wednesday meme sponsored by Kootoyoo. Today there is a dog toy, drawings, pattern pieces, miscellaneous tools, yarn, threads, scraps and some rabbit and alien friends waiting to be finished in a box by the wall. There are also the heads of five small rag dolls that are still awaiting the rest of their bodies cut out... poor things.



Let the Dog In!
At the Shop
The dog toy is a first attempt towards Carrie K's pit bull toy. It's not a pit bull. More like a fat squat dachshund, and houndstooth at that. But it is a nice pattern and I'll be making more of them :) Back to the 'drawing' board...

Jhoanna posted a link to Crammed Organisms, a plush show that has a deadline of March 29th. Their theme is 'Fairytale, Folk and Fable' .. and I'm drawing a BLANK! Besides the dragon, everything I have is not exactly fairy tale... and everything else I can think up is boring. I want to find something I can get excited about making but for some reason I just keep coming up with nothing but air... *sigh*

Notes: Esme was four months old yesterday. I had a postpartum diabetes test last week and it came out normal.

Crafting 365: day four and Homefront

Homefront
Esme loves to play with Daddy while he reads.


A big smile for Daddy

Crafting365: day four. I picked up a coloring book yesterday for ideas. After we had looked through it, Mark drew me a small slug picture and asked how that would be made into a toy. An hour later we had the beginning of an invasion of giant felt slugs ;)


At the Shop
Cute Giant Slugs!
We'll try to keep them well-fed on felt leaves so they don't
go after the poor bunnies anymore.

Hippo Toy and Captcha

Mark read today that Google Blogger is now requiring TWO captchas (image verification stuff) to make a comment to a post. SHEESH! How hard do they have to make it to read blogs anymore?

---

The other day at the fabric counter I bought a bolt of nice grey cloth. I was thinking elephants. Mark suggested hippos or rhinos. We were talking about a hippo mouth (kind of like the dragon) full of big flat teeth. Today I was over at Two Little Banshees and she is talking ab out making a hippo as well. It got me to sketching tonight about how to do that open mouth... all those teeth showing interest me :) Here is what I came up with.


Happy Toothy Hippo

Miscellaneous working sketches I like
Click to Enlarge

Almost Done Giraffing

Here is the finished giraffe. I need to write the pattern instructions now. If I had to rate him on a scale of 1 to 10 for difficulty I'd say a 4.5. However, I'd rate the toy horse pattern at a 2.0 on that same scale.

I had to put the ears in an extra seam sideways down the head (see illustration below).


I hate putting ears in sideways. It's probably a pet peeve, but I think it's bad design *most* of the time. In some cases, like this one where it was such a small head and a tight seam, it becomes necessary. Giraffe ears kind of stick out like that anyway.