Elephants EVERYWHERE!

Almost exactly a week ago my hubby Mark and I sat down with some pieces of mohair and had a brainstorming session. My plan was to create a couple of teds in various sizes out of the same fur, but Mark had the brilliant idea to make them elephants - specifically a whole family of elephants!

So we got to work printing out various sizes of our Elephant pattern to achieve this look. We ended up with two in the original 9" size, one in a 115% enlargement (ended up at 11"), one at a 130% enlargement (13"), one at 80% reduction (ended up at 7" tall) and two at a 55% reduction (ended up a petite 5" tall).

(This can be done with nearly all of our instant download e-patterns. Just play with the percentage settings before you print. The seam allowances will automatically decrease/increase with the pattern pieces. So as long as you follow the same proportions there the altered pattern will work just as well as the original)

This is how bizarre elephants look without eyes and ears!

But we quickly remedied that! It literally took ALL week, but slowly little elephant faces started to peer back at me...

(closing the last seams late this afternoon)

I had busted my butt to get all 7 of these guys done before the kindy pick up (so I could get photos before the kids got home and wanted to 'help'!), but I got outside to my photo-spot and the lighting was TERRIBLE! I nearly had a little tantrum. I'd worked so hard to get them ready in time. But I didn't. I vented to Mark in the car on the way to the kindy, and by the time we had the kids and were driving home I'd totally gotten over it. I decided to give it one more go, but if the light was still crappy - the photos would just have to wait until the next morning.

But the light was good again! And we managed to get these lovely photos of all the elephants.

From largest to smallest we have:

Estelle Elephant - 13" (SOLD)

Ella Elephant - 11"

Esme Elephant - 9"

Edgar Elephant - 9"

Evie Elephant - 7"

Elsie Elephant - 5" 

Elmo Elephant - 5"

Collaboration Bears - little ones!

My energy levels have been a little low lately. The kids have tag-teamed with horrendous sleeping for the last 6-7days, and my body is really struggling. (Meanwhile they always wake up looking fresh and chirpy!).

So I decided to tackle a few smaller bears to give myself a break. And whipped up these three Collaboration Bears.

This little guy is 'Pocketo', and he's the last one left available from the trio.

This is 'Ping Ping', and I had a lot of fun choosing her nose colouring and matching her accessories.

And this is 'Scraps'. Made in a really lovely stone-grey ratinee mohair with a darker tip. I have always loved these mohair piles, and this little guy is no exception. He too has been adopted though.

Pink and Green

I had a bit of fun with some experiemental mohair dyeing again recently, and ended up with two pieces of long pile mohair in a soft floral pink and a rather vibrant lime green. 

The pink was lovely. But the green was a little brighter then I had imagined  it would be. But I decided to see  how the two colours would work together. 

This little lady was one of the resulting bears. We've called her 'Sweet Dreams' after a variety of small pink rose. She stands in at 14" tall and is actually made in our 'Lyric' pattern, just reduced down to 85% to give us a slightly smaller bear.

She's currently available in our etsy store.

~*~

And this little lady is 'Hydrangea'. Also named after flowers - this time a little less obscure. I found an example of the flowers that inspired this bear through a google search - I love the way all the individual flowers make the ball shape.

Very much like this bear's head!

Hydrangea is also currently available in our etsy store.

The (rather large) rainbow custom bear

This big bear is one of our latest custom requests. We've used the 'Belarius' pattern, altering it slightly to add the cheek inserts in white - so you could actually make out the face in among all that COLOUR!!!

We actually have a last little bit of this crazy faux fur left in our etsy store if you'd like to have a play with it. And we have a whole new batch of hand painted eyes in both our etsy store and our webstore (Unique collections in each shop).

We had our second scan today. This time the mum got to come too (which for her meant getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a flight here, seeing the baby for all of maybe 5min on the ultrasound, then having to fly back home this afternoon!).

It was a magical 5mins though. This wriggly little miracle danced and jigged about in my belly. The fertility specialist showed us where all the bits were - but it's pretty self explanatory at this stage. In this snapshot you can see the amniotic fluid/sack as the black circle, baby is the baby-shaped white form in the middle of it! Head in the middle, body leaning up on the left and a leg jutting out to the top. The other white splotches towards the top of the black circle are bits of umbilical cord coming into view.

It was truly amazing to see the detail we could see - the spirals of the umbilical cord, the feet, with tiny tiny toes, fingers, the jaw line, the brain! Just incredibly when baby wasn't even quite 4cm long yet.

Needless to say both myself and baby's mum are over the moon. We didn't expect things to happen first go with the embryo transfer. We didn't expect that the baby would necessarily stick around after we got the positive pregnancy test. But things are looking good. It's still too early to get too settled in the security of the pregnancy progressing to full term safely - but we're both hopefully optimistic. :)

Truly Scrumptious

These little darlings have just been 'born' this afternoon. I've been posting updates of their progress on our facebook page, and asked for some name suggestions which is how 'Truly' and 'Scrumptious' came about.

Truly is the big sister and Scrumptious the little one.

They're both cut from a piece of our hand-dyed rainbow sparkle mohair and one of the last pieces of our white curly kid mohair! (I still can't believe we got through a WHOLE ROLL of that fur!!!)

Truly is 13" tall and has actually already been adopted.

Scrumptious is 9" tall and also available in our esty store.

Fixing a very special Horsie

Meet 'Horsie'. She belongs to a very special little girl who has treasured her for years! She's been so treasured in fact that she's a little worn and broken in places. The little girl's mum sent her to us this week to see what we could do...

... so we quickly got to work on disassembling Horsie's limbs (which was actually trickier than I anticipated!). This was the end result. It does kind of look like Horsie exploded though... :P

We chose some hard-wearing cotton and fleece for the new limbs, retained the paw pads with original applique detail and built her back up. I matched the colours on the hoofs to the ribbons used for her mane. I think the mane is my favourite bit actually!

Her finished photos are below :)