Cat Toys – Flat and easy

As you can see it is quite a pleasure to create your own cat looking toy. To be honest it is not that hard as well for if you’ve got any textile in hand you could create a personal and therefore unique toy. You could use a sew machine or you could sew with your own hands and a single needle.

It is true that industrialization can provide us with numerous copies of a great variety of fantastic toys – soft textile, long fur, nice design, all that easy to get, minutes away from you and at a relatively low price. But what about art and uniqueness? And what about creative mind pleasure and solving problem issues that can pull us into new and special. Special is the word I was looking for.

To create something special can give you wings and energy. And it doesn’t matter weather you’re going to give that toy to a child that doesn’t understand it’s uniqueness or you’re going to keep it. The process of creating new is the one that matters.

So now what do we need to start? We need textile as we said, we need a needle, sewing cotton thread, buttons, electric sewing machine (if available), pair of scissors, some wadding and that’s about all.

What about design? Where do we start with the most intriguing part of our doll creation process? Well one way is to sit down and draw your project on a sheet of paper. That’s ok. That means we have a plan. But we can start by creating directly a model with the textile and believe me it is quite more interesting with all the mistakes that come up and the fact that mistakes turn to new ideas. Well, yes, there is going to be some material thrown away but is that a problem actually? No, usually it isn’t.

But having a sheet of paper with drawing or not we need an idea as for where exactly to start from. If we try to create the most simple model we will imagine what kinds of pieces we have to create. We know we need the body of the cat, we need the head, the tail and the legs. And that’s it – body, tail, head, four legs.

The doll you see is my first experiment and although it looks rather too simple it is actually quite sweet and nice to hug. Now sewing the pieces is rather clear to you. As shown below you can cut 8 pieces of textile for the legs and sew them in pairs, the head also two pieces and the body again two pieces and the tail again the same.

After you sew the legs, because I always start from the legs, you fill them with wadding and see if you like them. If not you create them again. Now there is this thing about liking. The estimation that we have of what we do – do I like it the way it is? Shouldn’t it be longer, or fatter, or less filled with wadding? Now – that’s part of the joy. As you can see this blue cat doll is rather flat because I didn’t put enough wadding. Now it was suppose to be like that and one of my next dolls Is rather filled quite well to try a different effect. This flat doll can bent and can sit and although I forgot to sew a tail (which is quite funny actually) is a doll you can play with. Funny as it sounds. It falls, it bents, it’s head is ruled by gravity and is always looking down at the ground and that makes it very sweet. You pick the head up and in five minutes it is looking down.

After we have finished with the legs – we have turned them upside down and we have filled them - we could sew them to the body before it is sewed or we could create the body, fill it and then sew the legs by hand with a needle hiding all that shouldn’t be seen. And after we are ready with the body and legs we can create the head and sew it by hand or carefully with the electric sewing machine to the body. Quite easy actually all that.

In the next material you could see another model I have tried.