So you've got your body drawn, designed, sewn up and ready to finish. Now we get to the knitty gritty's. Bodies with pulled seams and puckers, unsightly bulges etc are going to detract from your work, so getting a good base form sorted is important. But, it is the next part of the plush that usually makes a difference when it comes to plush.

You're going to add the parts of the piece which make up the character: the eyes, nose, mouth, tail, horns, prehensile teeth, antenna, prolapsed colon...whatever. You've worked this out on paper already, and are confident that your character is fabulous....so now's the time to see if you were actually correct.

Jill Penney's Fimo models of her pieces for Plush It

The translation from 2-d to 3-d is a tricky one. Interestingly, plush maestro Jill Penney created some small Fimo models of her Plush It Designs before making the finished product, which is a labour intensive process, but makes a lot of sense. 2-D and 3-D sometimes seem like completely different visual languages, what is very successful in one form, doesn't always work out that well in the other. Which is why my illustrations suck and some people have the most beautiful tags, websites and promo material for their plush, but the actual object is a little meh.

Firstly: materials

Eyes: Eyes can be made from buttons (I use buttons which I embellish with dimensional paint). They can be shank buttons (on the underside of the button is a little loop of plastic with which you sew it to the piece. Benefit: you don't see button holes on the final piece. Drawback, on smooth fabrics like cotton they can flop around a bit as they don't sit flush to the fabric, or buttons with holes in them (dunno what the proper name is). Each needs to be secured pretty tightly to the piece, as this is often the thing that will come off, in transit to the gallery, in the customers hand when they buy it! I tend to use double thread and just try to sew it as strongly and as tightly as possible....and still have eyes that come loose and fall off, so I'm not the greatest advisor when it comes to this.

My piece, Floral Ecstacy. As you can see, you can find some interesting buttons which make for some out of the box kind of eyes!

Beautifully embroidered sugar skull plush by the multi-talented Geek Freeks

You can embroider your eyes on. This means using stitches to create the illusions of eyes. If you're very proficient at embroidery, you can embroider shapes and colours, much as if you were drawing on the fabric, or, more simply, you can use an embroidery stitch on the outside of some fabric which you've cut in the shape of your eyes

Nerderella's lovely piece for Plush It. If drawing's your thing, using felt can be a useful way to translate your drawing of eyes etc more truly, as it remains flat and 2-D like your sketch

You can cut out felt shapes and stick them on, or use neoprene. Use a pretty strong glue, stuff like hot glue guns and aquadhere can actually loose their bond in hot climates like mine (I live in the tropics...sigh). Araldite is often pretty tough.

Shawnimals Pocket Pork with safety eyes (I think!)

Ugly Doll OX

You can use safety eyes. A must if making plush for small children. All of the above strategies, except for the embroidered one are possible choking risks for small children. Buttons, definitely, everything else, not so much. Safety eyes are a plastic domed eye which has a long shank on the back which you feed through a small hole in your plush. they are attached very securely by a washer which you push on the shank from the inside of the turned out plush. Best to do this before putting the stuffing in. they are much more difficult for little fingers to remove and then put in their mouths, so keep this in mind when thinking of your prospective audience. Shawnimals and Ugly Dolls really have cross market appeal, they are beloved by the very small and the not so small, so Shawnimals tends to use safety eyes in his pieces (I think from looking at them) and Ugly Dolls tends to embroider theirs on.

John Knox's piece for Plush It

You can also use materials like t-shirt transfer paper which is how I think John Know of Hello Brute does his. This way, if you want your plush to ressemble very closely your digital designs, you can actually print out your faces with an inkjet printer and heat seal them to your fabric. Be careful about doing this with synthetic and stretch material. His My Pal Sooky La-La show was incredibly successful plush wise and the pieces were fairly simple, but coupled with his incredible faces which he created for each one, made a range of plush pieces that had a lot of the clean graphic and endearing qualities of his other designs.

This was a collaborative piece that Marita Albers and I did. Being a painter, she painted up some beautiful faces on canvas and then I stitched them to the body I'd made. It works best if you use some pretty felxible painting surface (canvas was maybe a little stiff) and sew the pieces (often an over stitch, a stitch you can see on the outside of the piece, before they are stuffed)

So here's a variety of approaches that are fairly do-able for most people. You can get buttons, safety eyes, felt and canvas from most craft shops and inkjet transfer paper can be bought from most printing consumable outlets. There's some interesting stuff out there as well, the imitates the complex process of dye sublimation (ink is impreganted into a synthetic fabric surface) that's even better than inkjet transfer paper, but I haven't been able to get hold of any. Next we'll look at some other more complex ways of putting together a character