Softies humanized

"Neither humans, nor animals" - this is what the file is entitled in which I collect these plushies: objects, vegetables etc. with a face.

The eights were turned into soft toys for Andy's City Apartments in Milton Keynes:

three times eight is equal with how many plushies...?

But before all of them I created their plush plumber fellow:

a stuffed plumber with plush tools

An example that you can create your own toy even if you are an adult: Band-Aid Man was one of the funniest requests I've ever had - a softie ordered by a fantastic mom for her grown-up daughter:

custom Band-Aid plush with limbs of course

I don't know many French words, but I learnt "biberon" for a lifetime when I was turning this drawing into a plushie:

plush biberon to comfort a little boy

"Marker" was a big love of mine! You might think there is nothing special about him, but look, what Gretchen's mom wrote about him to me:

"This is a picture of Marker.  Marker is a marker.  :)  He is always purple - in the attached picture, he looks a little faded - but usually he's very purple - I think her real markers are getting dried out from over-use.  Marker is the star of all of Gretchen's books and stories.  She draws him everywhere.  He has a whole Marker family, and his friends include Eraser and Big Fat Whiteboard.  His body is always square-ish, with a round top.  His outline is always black, too."

So it was quite obvious that Marker should be born as a soft toy version.

What's more, Gretchen also makes videos starring Marker! Do not hesitate to watch one of them! This one for example :-)

Marker drawn and explained and sewn into a plushie

 
 
Jacques in a Smock is also a star, he's the main character of a children's book written by a father for his daughters:

artist's drawing into a 3D artist

Cranky and Grumpy live their lives in a theatre in New York, quite surprisingly called Sour Grapes Productions. They travelled a lot between Europe and America thanks to hidden secrets of mysterious postal services: they crossed the ocean three times...

custom stuffed fruits

Vampire Bat Kitty and Others

Imaginary creatures – well, yes, the dino is the odd one out, but it was designed by the brother of Olive, who drew the beautiful, stripy, 3-eyed monster, so for their sake dinos are welcome in this post, too.

You know custom softies can’t compete with mass-produced plushies – regarding their price. Because it takes long hours, sometimes even days to turn your kid's drawing into a custom plushie. I sometimes spend lots of time searching for the perfect material or accessories, sometimes it is necessary to make a proto-softie first, sometimes I feel I should resew this or that to get the result I am satisfied with. That’s why these one-of-a-kind toys are not cheap. But sometimes I can’t resist to create a plushie – that’s what happened with the beautiful monster. Olive’s mom is an independent artist in Canada, who completely understood why the softie would cost the price I had given in the quote, but she couldn’t afford it. I was longing to work with this fantastic drawing so much that I gave some discount and we changed the deadline, so the softie could be born :-) Together with Olive’s brother’s dino :-)

Harmless plush monster together with a happy dino

The fluffy Vampire-Bat-Kitty went to scare people in Germany:

Vampire Bat Kitty - not only kids wish to see their ideas turned into custom plushies

Helena’s mom once saw a softie of mine which was made with a special crayon-technique, and she imagined the same style for the „A” softie – this time I was quite lucky to find the necessary crayons in a shop in Budapest, though earlier I had to order them from abroad. I loved the rainbow spikes… :-)

There's no limit when creating your own toy:)

Bonus... :-) The other "crayoned" softie, a rabbit called Hattie:

A special drawing, a book illustration reborn as a soft toy

 

Alex's anniversary present

What would your first idea be when asked to embroider a "30" on a basketball?

Birthday plushie?!

That it's for a birthday, am I right? Well, I was wrong, 30 is the number of Alex's favourite NBA player :-)

Self-portrait drawing into a plushie

One of the best parts of making this plushie was to create the basketball. First to find out how many pieces should be used to sew this sphere (yes, 8, as a basketball is divided into 8 sections), how to draw them (it's all about some geometry), how to put them together (good old blanket stitches), how to make the ball sturdy enough (I hid a tabletennis ball inside), how to create the black lines (I used very narrow ribbon with Vliesofix), how to add the number "30" (it's embroidered on an elliptic piece of yellow cotton) - and it was just the basketball. I haven't talked about the cap, the trainers, the T-shirt or the jeans. Next time, guys :-)

As I'm not brave enough to turn photos of you into soft toys, but the softie was for a lovely returning customer, so I didn't want to say no, I asked them to turn the photos into drawings first - youngsters use Snapchat to do this :-) And it is a first anniversary gift, so I added Rachel, too:

A first-anniversary softie

 Okay, let's see a close-up:

Alex, Rachel, love

Details:

Details of a soft basketball player