Sea Turtle Plush Pillow

I definitely kept myself busy these past two weeks back home. If you read any of my latest blog posts you know I have a very interesting work travel and home rotation. This means less time to do fun crafting or sewing projects when I am home in my craft room. Don’t worry I make due with what time I have. I squeeze as many projects I can without overwhelming myself. So far so good.

You can probably guess from my blog post title what my next project is… hmmm…. yes, a sea turtle plush pillow. I was asked by a friend and colleague if I can make her a sea turtle plush big enough to be like a pillow. She told me that she could never find a sea turtle plush big enough or colorful enough to her liking plus it needed to very soft and comfy. She also mentioned to me that since I am the artist she wants me to design it anyway I want as long as it had many colors. Easy, right? Maybe…

I love having the opportunity to design a plush however I want but the problem is I am afraid of disappointing her if it isn’t to her liking. This is a huge fear I have but I know deep down I will do anything in my power to not disappoint her.  I believe I have good taste and a good sense of color selection and matching. I can do this!

I thought of designing my own sea turtle pattern but before I did that I wanted to make sure I don’t already have a pattern in my stash that I might have bought already. The past few years I’ve collected so many different patterns from some of my favorite plushie designers that I may already have a sea turtle pattern. After searching through my electronic files on my computer I found a sea turtle pattern by Funky Friends Factory. Perfect! Pauline, the owner of Funky Friends Factory, creates amazing patterns!

In order to use this sea turtle pattern I had to resize it to the size I desired for the project. Good thing is that Pauline has a blog post on how to enlarge or shrink her patterns with multiple options, you can see here. This post is great if you’ve never enlarged or shrunk a pattern before since it includes many helpful tips. I’ve referred to it before a long time ago but I may reference it again if I ever need to use a different method when resizing a pattern.  I use the printer option to enlarge the sea turtle plush to 170%, which ended up being the perfect size for a pillow plush.

Now that I have the pattern, I need to figure out my colors. I got a little stuck when trying to figure out what color palate I wanted to go with. I also had to keep in mind that my friend wants the plush pillow to be very soft so my type of fabric gets narrowed down to minky or some faux fur fabrics since they are soft to the touch. Fleece fabrics can be soft too but not as much as minky or faux fur fabrics. I realized very quickly that there is not a huge selection of colors at my local sewing and craft store for minky or faux fur fabrics. Great… What am I going to do?

There are some online stores that have different patterns and colors for minky fabrics but they can be a little costly or take a while before they deliver it. This makes it difficult since I am only home for a short amount of time before I have to go on travel for work. You know what, there is one place I have not looked yet. I have like 8 storage containers underneath my sewing table full of remnant fabrics I have collected over the past few years from my local sewing and craft stores, in which one local store has been closed for over a year now :-(.  Who knows, I might find something that will actually work plus I can start using up some of my fabric stash for once.

After looking through all 8 containers, I actually found a colorful minky fabric! Woohoo! Even better, I have a coordinating solid minky fabric color that matches perfectly with the pattern minky I found. Yay, amazing!

Perfect color combinations, don’t you think? I know my friend will love these colors. I plan to use the pattern minky fabric for the shell and nose tip of the sea turtle and the light sea foam green solid minky color for the flippers, tail and head. Oh I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

I don’t think I ever mentioned this before in any of my past posts but I kind of do this thing where I separate cutting fabric and sewing fabric into different days.  I discovered a long time ago I would get frustrated or worn out after cutting a lot of pattern pieces that when I would sew the pieces right after I would get even more frustrated. This resulted in many bad sewing mistakes and me having to re-cut pattern pieces. I admit that I wanted to give up a few times and this is not a good feeling to have. I had to come up with a solution so one day I separated my days out. Over time I realized that if I cut the fabric pieces on the first day then sew them together the second day I usually get better results in my sewing. I felt more accomplished and stress free. . I don’t know how to explain it, but it works for me.

Oh, if you are wondering I usually do my embroidery stitch out the same day I cut fabric pieces out too. Sometimes I do end up separating embroidery and cutting fabric into different days depending on how I feel. For this project though I decided not to embroider the eyes since I had these beautiful big blue safety eyes that would work out perfectly for this sea turtle. I bought the safety eyes years ago thinking I was going to use them in a past project but found out that they were too big for it. You can imagine I was super excited to finally use them in a project. You can see for yourself in these photos of the finished sea turtle on how well the safety eyes worked out:

Cute! Look at those baby blue eyes, precious.

You know what? When I look at this sea turtle I think of the sea turtles, Crush and Squirt, from Finding Nemo. Hehe. I don’t know why but it was the first thing that came to mind. If you haven’t seen Finding Nemo, you definitely should. It is an adorable kids movie that anyone can enjoy. You can say it, my mind is a little weird sometimes but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love my creative and intricacy of my mind. Makes it more fun and enjoyable.

Well this turned out to be one cute and adorable sea turtle. Oh BTW, my friend loves it! Hooray! Fear of her hating it is over. Now to my next project…

Thanks for stopping by!

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