no-sew Mr Cthulhu plushie (regular)

Being on something of a plushie-making kick lately, I decided to make another Mr Cthulhu plushie for my friend overseas. However, instead of using my usual method of stitching, I decided to see if I could do it faster and at less effort by making the whole thing using hot glue.

It turned out pretty well overall. 

The catch? Well, sticking any bits of fabric together using glue results in stiffness…so the edges are a tad stiff. The other part is that hot glue can be a tad messy, so there are glue drips that are difficult to remove…also some parts have turned out a tad lumpy due to me not pressing the edges tightly together in time – or have bits of glue seeping out of the edges.

Link / Legend of Zelda Cthulhu Knight triforce plushie

Back in high school, before I realized that I suffered from a bad case of video-game-induced motion sickness, I used to be crazy about all sorts of video games. Luckily my affliction does not extend to anything 2-D so I can at least stick to my good old fall-back gameboy games.

Hence I was really chuffed when my friend loaned me a copy of Legend of Zelda for gameboy, which got me really hooked on that series.

One of my new friends totally loves octopus and loves dressing up as a knight and bashing people, which inspired me to make him a cthulhu knight plushie...

He’s made the same way all the regular ones are made…with added extras….

I decided to go with a ‘chainmail look’. Obviously getting hold of a lot of chains was a bit out of my price range for the moment, but I did have a bag of gold sequins lying around…so it was essentially something of a no-brainer to create the armour by hot glueing rows and rows of sequins onto him. In hindsight, considering how easy it was to burn the tips of my fingers and how long it took to complete both sides, I probably should have gone with buying actual chains and cutting them to the right length instead. The ideal method would have been to use sequined fabric though…. 

Given that no knight is complete without his shield, I decided to make the shield out of white felt with a painted design. I used two layers stuck together with fabric glue in order to give it some ‘stiffness’, whilst it was off to ehow.com to find out the best way of adding the design with the acrylic paint that I had lying around....

Turned out rather well for a first attempt at painting on felt...

Cross Stitch Bananza - continued

As part of my re-opened interest in cross stitch, I also realized that there are quite a few people who I know who seem to like octopus/cthulhu. The great thing about these designs is that they can be quite unisex, which means that I don’t have to be too selective about who I give them to as I don’t really like keeping all of the stuff that I make as it tends to take up space and I’m not very good at preserving things that I want to hang onto.

So it was really awesome that during a google search for ‘simple cross stitch octopus patterns’ that I found these two awesome designs.

1) Courtesy of http://hancockshouseofhappy.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/free-cute-octopus-valentine-cross.html

2) 2) OK, so the site is ‘knitting designs’ but the pattern is in squares so it works really well for cross stitch too…http://www.knitperfect.com/Knitting-Charts/Octopus-v1-Knit-Chart