Monster Tutorial

We needed monsters and so we made a bunch. (Possibly a dungeon of monsters actually) Some of you wondered how we did it, so here is a tutorial explaining how. I must say here that the designing brain behind this was Mrs 25 (Picklesticks). I have her permission to write this tutorial. There is no pattern needed, you just go with the flow!

It's not necessary to have a large Ikea bag full of fabric to create a monster, but it's how we do it!

You will need

• polar fleece for monster front and legs. Two or three colours.

• felt for eye and teeth
  

• teddy bear eye
  

• fur fabric for monster back
  

You start out by looking at the shape of the polar fleece that you have. (This accounts for some of our weirdly shaped monsters) Find a piece that looks like a monster and cut it out.

Some monsters have a mouth that cuts their head in two or you can insert a mouth on one side like I have here. Cut the monster piece for the mouth. This is also when you cut out some teeth or a tongue if you want to put them in.

Choose a narrow stretch stitch on your sewing machine. This is the stitch that you will use for the entire project. If you don't have a relatively narrow stretch stitch choose a narrow zig zag stitch to use for the entire project.

Stitch the mouth to the rest of the head using a narrow seam. If you are putting teeth in sandwich them between the mouth and monster pieces before sewing this seam.

Next is the eye. (You can use as many as you like. We tend to go for the cyclops look cause it stretches the available eyes across more monsters. However, I think a 3 or even 5 eyed monster would look very scary!) You need to use felt on both sides of the eye. This is so that the polar fleece doesn't stretch and the eye fall out.

Sew the top piece of felt on the front of the monster. It is not necessary to have the back piece of felt sewn on. It doesn't even have to be the same size as the front. Just large enough to keep the eye in place. (You can use scrap pieces of felt for this)

Clip the felt and polar fleece so that the teddy eye can be placed in the felt. Clip the back piece of felt too.

Place the eye through the front of the monster and then push the back piece of felt onto the teddy eye and secure the eye.

This is how it looks from the back.

The finished monster front. Next you make the legs and arms if your monster needs limbs.

Mrs 25 always sews the limbs freehand. This freaked me out at first and I did draw my first set of legs and arms with pen on the wrong side of the polar fleece. Do this if you want to. I soon realised that the limbs don't have to be very accurate to be representative of monster's limbs! Put the polar fleece together with the right side on the inside. You must have the stretchy bit of the polar fleece running across the narrow part of the limbs. This is so you can turn the limbs through more easily.

Now is the time to get your Purple Thang out if you have one. I recently won one at the Wallaroo retreat and it works a treat!

Turn your limbs through. If they are narrow this can be a little difficult, but with a Purple Thang I managed to turn through really narrow arms without any trouble at all. (The stretch helps here)

These are my three legs. Not identical at all, but very monster-like!

Pin the limbs to the finished monster front.

Place the finished monster front on the fur and cut out a back. You can just use polar fleece for the back if you want. We did for some. However the fur has much more prescence! (Place the monster front and the fur with right sides together before you cut out the back)

Sew the front and back together leave a small opening so you can turn your monster through and stuff it. The best place for such an opening is either on the bottom or the top.

Make sure you leave the turning opening larger than I did here! It was a struggle to work with such a small opening.

Turn the monster through.

The finshed, flat monster. Now to give it some shape!

Stuff your monster

Thread a needle double and tie a knot at the end.

Then sew the opening up using ladder stitch. Knot the end of the thread when you are finished and cut the thread off.

Finished monster! Hmm..... he probably could do with some teeth. I just completely forgot them! Have fun, and I hope you make plenty of monsters.