The above images are the images of the drawstring pouch and the embroidery I made during class. This was my first time learning any textile related skills, so it was great practice for my upcoming project.
Motive
I decided to make an otter plushie out of the pre-approved patterns. I planned to place it on my nightstand to use it as a smartphone holder while charging. I added embroidery of a charging sign on its clam to emphasize that the otter is a smartphone charging dock. I made a brief mock-up using photoshop.
Building Process
I printed out the template of the plushie on the pdf file as actual size.
I cut out the pieces of fabric following the template. I had to keep in mind in which orientation I was cutting so the stretchy part of the fabric is facing the right way.
Completed the head mostly using the sewing machine. The studio was out of fills for the plushie, so I had to use cotton balls instead. Once the head was full, I hand sewed the back of the head to close the opening.
I went through the same process for the body. Once both the body and the head was complete, I hand sewed them together to complete the otter part of the project. I was ready to move on to the clam and the embroidery.
I found a charging sign online and imported it into Inkscape. I had to do some cleanups, so all the parts were individual parts and not overlapping and had to add some colors too. When I imported the vertex file into PE Design, everything was clean and ready to print. I just had to change the order of the printing since the order was in the black-green-black process. I changed it to black-black-green, so I only needed to change the thread once.
The building process of the clam was similar to the head or the body. I embroidered the charging sign on the fabric first, then cut out the fabric using the template. Used the sewing machine to sew the fabrics together, filled it up, and hand sewed to close the opening. Once the clam was done, I just had to hand sew the clam to the otter’s hands.
Reflection
The entire process took about 6 hours. Using the sewing machine made the process much faster and easier. However, I encountered many limitations from using it. First, I wasn’t able to sew the parts completely accurate. Due to my lack of experience using the machine, the fabric tended to shift around while I was sewing, resulting in some inaccurate sewing. Second, there were several unwanted openings around the edges that the machine sewing did not close it up. I had to hand sew these parts to close them. Finally, I wasn’t able to machine sew near the end of the process as the parts got fat and thick duo to multiple layers and fill. I thought sewing was mostly done by machine, but I learned that hand sewing is more reliable and useful in some cases.