I heart Funky Friends Factory. Seriously. Her patterns are always easy to follow, and when she does a photo tutorial, she’s super clear. Her site is where I got the monkey for B, the horses and unicorns for MM’s counsin’s kids and my coworker’s friend’s new baby. I’ve purchased and downloaded other patterns to make (that I haven’t gotten around to), and really look forward to making.
B’s first birthday is coming up, and I decided to revisit my favorite kid toy site!. This time, for ideas of what to make. I narrowed it down to two – Ellie the Elephant and Pete the Puppy. MM loved the elephant, so I ended up focusing on that one (I think Pete may become a gift later this year).
First up was printing the pattern. Let me say this – I panicked a bit when I realized I hadn’t thought of anything for B. So I rushed through printing the pattern and instructions. This is something that I shouldn’t have done, because I missed one very key point – printing the actual size. If you don’t check that box in the print dialog, the program/printer will scale the page to fit the paper.
Here’s why that’s important. See that dart mark on the main body piece? Turns out, since I didn’t do the right thing on the printer dialog, that dart isn’t the right size. It didn’t affect much, until it was time to put the whole thing together, and I got around it, but man, it would have been easier to actually print the thing in the right size to begin with… 🙂
I chose the typical gray fabric for the majority of the body, and two contrast fabrics. The ears and the back foot pads are of a bubbly fleece fabric, which hopefully will be interesting for B to touch, and the tummy and front foot pads are super soft, fuzzy fleece. Oh, and the tusks just had to be white.
I’m in full agreement with the instructions that pinning the ear lobes up to keep them out of the way is the best thing to do, as you can see in the pictures!
All in all, the pattern is pretty easy to put together. Fewer pieces than the monkey, and I swear the majority of my time was taken up by my printing mistake and embroidering the back foot pad with B’s name.
Right about now is when I stopped taking pictures. I got stressed because of my misprinted dart, followed by how to fix it, followed by multiple iterations of the embroidered foot pad. But once I fixed the dart situation, and got the food embroidered, and my label attached, he turned out fantastic!
I love his green eyes, and I love the different textures he has. By the way, I’m not calling him Ellie – obviously a girl’s name. He’s just the elephant to me. I’ll let B name him. And if I make another in the future for a girl, for sure it’ll be Ellie again. Or whatever the little girl wants to name it.
How cute is this little guy!?!?