Felt Up Good: Softies & Such: Sweet Zoo: A Scribble Softie

There’s this awesome song my dad played a lot for my sister and me when we were growing up. Well, there are a lot of awesome songs he’d play actually. Like the soundtracks to Willow and Fiddler on the Roof, and then songs like “Graceland” or “That’s Just the Way It Is.” There was also a surprising amount of Enya.

But the song that was stuck in my head as I haphazardly sewed and felted and stitched last night’s project was not the masterpiece “Orinoco Flow.” No, it’s a song I just looked up and found is called “Sweet Zoo” by Barbara Streisand, which tells the tale of a childlike dream of becoming various animals. At one point in the song, she turns into an “alligator / Crocodile? / No, alligator! / With a great big mouth / and four very funny little legs / which are no good for dancing.”

This is what I think of as a “scribble softie.” It’s like a sketch on a drawing pad, but 3D. It’s not perfect, just like a doodle, but maybe one day I’ll expand upon this sketch and make something a little more perfect. That’s not to say I don’t love my little mistake-ridden gator croc, because I most certainly do, just like all my misfit softies.

Here is a tutorial, though I don’t know how much I can recommend this project to the average crafter. I messed up a lot and had to deal with a lot of little issues creatively, but I created the issues to begin with by not properly thinking it through. My brain doesn’t always work.

I only had one piece of the green I liked, so I couldn’t put the tail on both pieces. No worries, I thought. I’ll just cut out a huge tail piece on one side that I can fold around later.

Then I needlefelted some eyes, nostrils and some dots down his spine. One way to give a little more life to big black eyes is to embroider a little white dot in each eye. I did that, and then I gave him two little finger lines on each foot.

Then I did the tail thing. I just folded it over right-side-in, and sewed.

I wanted it to have a mouth that would open, so I cut off the green part of the lower jaw on the bottom piece, and sewed on a red piece, with plans to stitch on another green piece underneath it later. I should have done it before putting the top and bottom body pieces together, but I didn't.

The "little legs" lyric is particularly apropos in this project, because when I randomly decided to create a little softie alligator crocodile (much like Barbara, I’m just not sure), I disregarded one of the golden rules of softie-making, which is that all appendages need to be nice and fat, because otherwise it’s difficult to turn it right-side-out after the sewing process. I broke one of his little feet when I got frustrated while using a tweezers and paintbrush to push them right-side-out. I used a needle and green thread and "crazy stitched" it up. Crazy stitch is exactly what it sounds like.

Boom! An almost complete alligator. Right now he doesn't have a lower jaw, much like the narrator in the book Invisible Monsters, which, incidentally, I just finished reading for a book club. The cool points just keep on a-comin'!

As you may recall, I had sewed it together before adding the lower jaw. Again, I utilized the crazy stitch to sew the lower jaw piece on and I just tried to not sew through the top of his head. When I was younger I wanted to be a brain surgeon for a brief period. It's probably good that I went with a different career path.

I love pose-ability in softies, so as I was stuffing, I added two pipe cleaner "axles" to each pair of legs, front and back. Maybe he'll dance after all!

When stuffing a softie, stuff until you think it's done, then stuff more before closing it up. So, remember that hole between the tail and the lower body? I stuffed through there and then closed it up with--you guessed it--the crazy stitch.