Scrap Monsters

Mary-Beth, Alphozo, Alice, Raymond, Quincy, Tolly, and Ozwald.

I don't believe in wasting fiber. So when I finished my senior project I had two nine foot crocodiles, and a lot of left over fabric in odd shapes. It seemed perfectly obvious therefore to make a series of scrap monsters.

The difficult part is putting together the body shapes. Mary-Beth was easy, she's a rectangle with rectangular appendages. Smaller, odder-scraps demand more complicated shapes. Sewing machines like rectangles like Mary-Beth. They don't like oddities like Ozwald, or sewing through five or more layers at once as is necessary for appendages. So a lot of the sewing I do by hand, or I reinforce by hand afterwards.

Adding Eyes.

Additional features are hand felted on. Eyes begin as huge balls of fluff that get matted down slowly. Generally eyes that look straight ahead are confrontational or creepy, so most of my monsters look off to the side. Oswald has three eyes, so he just looks everywhere.

Uh, Shelby? You got something on your mouth, there.

Felting is a process of making things smaller. Fine tuning the shaping on eyes and mouths can take forever since every alteration in outline changes the proportions and density of the entire feature. Above, Shelby's eyes are still pretty irregular. That can't be fixed until his mouth is on, since adding the mouth pulls in the entire plane of the face.

It might be awhile before I can finish him up though....