Plush Writeup - Sugar Cookie Ferret Adopt Plush

1/19/2022

I was inspired by scragster/Aspen's adopt collaborations to reach out to one of my favorite artists, Kappanuki, to see if she was interested in doing a collab with me sometime! She had been putting out so many adorable adopts that I was dying to make one of them into a plush. So I was thrilled when she agreed! I actually lost sleep a couple nights over it due to how excited I was by the prospect 😅

We quickly agreed that we wanted to do a noodle/ferret! But what theme? We tossed around a few ideas, but were fairly certain we wanted to do something food-themed.

I had some time on my hands between commissions, so I actually knocked out the pattern fairly early in the process before the design was finalized. Since we would be working off the same base as previous ferrets she had designed I could just reference those.

I wanted to use my long noodle pattern that I used for Aki but adjust the legs/paws and head. Tiny mochi paw pads were a must!

Oh I just love early patterns. They're so ugly. Aki had big chonky arms, so I redid the front arm entirely.

After another round of edits I was happy with the shapes (even if they were poorly stuffed here). I ended up being able to use the same head pattern as Tidbit and Confetti, which I was happy about as it omitted the gusset I thought I'd need on the forehead.

The tail was too skinny and would need to be fattened up on the final plush. The wrinkled arm was still an older version without a paw pad pattern underneath it (hence the pins, because it was stuffed with polypellets). I wouldn't bother to match it to the final arm pattern since it's just a prototype. When I am patterning mirrored parts of a plush I often will just adjust one and not the other to save on time and materials.

They were a baby already! I was very happy with the size and shapes.

After my sugar cookie ditto craze, Kappanuki knocked out this awesome sugar cookie ferret design! The best part for me as a plush maker was she picked minky colors from the Shannon website to design the character 🤩

I had actually never heard of the Shannon color blossom before, and realized it was an extra-wide exclusive color (which aren't included on my swatch set). It's a pretty color that's in the papaya family.

The design would end up being tweaked a bit more after but I went ahead and drew on the markings to transfer to the master pattern!

I entertained the thought of doing a more 'sugar cookie' base color (top right), but we decided to stick with natural. But since I have limited colors of mochi we tweaked the blue to match the lightest color of mochi I had. The additional blossom stripe below the main pink was also added and the front paws changed to match the pattern of the back paws.

A near-perfect first eye test! The outline needed to be adjusted and I accidentally flipped one of the eye shines. But other than that it was good!

All the embroidery! I decided to color block in most of the stripes as opposed to doing applique, as the design was getting a bit big for my embroidery machine.

Body sewn together!

I sewed the head together, and made a nose, but I didn't like the color so I would make another one. I also started second guessing the overall size of the eyes, markings, and shape of the head.

I decided to try needle sculpting the eyes, but I really didn't like it. It's really amazing how big of a difference needle sculpting can make!

This was a good lesson in "just go to bed and look at it again in the morning with fresh eyes." I need to do this more often. Kappanuki and I's time zones are also very different, so it was good to wake up to messages affirming my original head, and decided that just the nose needed to be made smaller, placed further down, and made a darker color. Thankfully, needle sculpting is so forgiving that you can just snip the threads and the head goes back to the original shape.

I remade the nose, and liked it much better! The color still wasn't right, though, and it was a hair too big. But it all saved me remaking the head entirely (which I'm used to having to do, tbh).

Noodle FLOP! Everything all sewn together. I got them stuffed and... oh man. They are a whole baby.

Then the nose adventures truly began. Despite buying many new colors of mochi at my local JoAnn's, none of the colors were right. Luckily... I had a new tool. Sublimation!

With sublimation I can pretty much make any color I want. To try and prevent some of the color underneath from showing, I used a pink base. But it still showed a lot of light pink on the edges after sewing it together. So I actually sublimated the nose again after it was sewn together to get to the bottom of those pesky fibers, and it helped a lot! This is definitely not something you can do with every pattern piece, but since it's a tiny nose that needed to be extra flat anyway, it worked great! (I wish I took before and after photos, but I was bad and didn't take any.)

A finished nose! Finally, Kappanuki tweaked the colors of the adopt again to match the thread used for the eyes and the nose, again due to limited colors.