Monster fun

My mother teaches Kindergarten at a public elementary school.   She is pretty much the best teacher in the entire world.  No seriously.  She decided a few years ago to decorate her classroom with cool monsters, and last year I decided that I would make her a monster class pet.  She bought the "pet" a cute little pet carrier and then every weekend a student has to take the class pet home and take care of it for the weekend.  They are supposed to return to school and tell about everything they did with the monster, and everyone writes about it and they make a little book through out the year with kids pictures and stories.  Well I thought that each year she should get a new monster.  Last year I crocheted the class pet, but I decided to make a fuzzy fleece one this year, so that he would hold up to washing a little better....maybe.

I started by cutting out all my pieces from a sheet on green fleece, and some small triangles from some pink fleece I had.  You can really use a bunch of different colors.  It would probably make it a much cooler monster the crazier it looks.  I cut the pieces that you see here plus a mouth.  I cut the mouth from the pink fleece.  You can see from the picture that I have the fleece folded over so that as I cut out an arm or ear or whatever I'm getting two pieces of fleece.  That way there is a front and a back the same size for each body part.

Then I started by sewing each arm.  Since I was working with fleece I didn't really have to worry about a wrong or right side.  I sewed around the outside of each arm, leaving the short end that attaches to the body open for stuffing.  As I was sewing around the tips of the "hands" I inserted my little pink triangles with the point to the inside and flat edge even with the edge of my green fleece as seen above. Now when you turn the arms right side out you will have cute little claws.  I put three claws on each paw/hand/foot/whatever, except for one which I only attached two claws.  Monsters don't need to be too symetrical (How do you spell that word?).

 Here you can see where I turned the arm right side out and then began sewing the next arm.

So next do the same thing with your ears.  Sew around the outside leaving an opening to turn.  Turn right side out.  Then pinch the bottoms of the ears like this and stitch over your pinch there to hold the scrunching in place.

Stuff your arms.

Now begin by placing all your pieces together.  You will leave one piece of the main body on your table and start placing ears and arms where you want them to go, but on top of and pointing inside your monster.  That didn't make any sense, but just look at the pictures. Then put your other main body piece on top of that and pin around the edges, holding all your arms and ears in place.  You want the open edges of the arms and ears to line up with the outer edge of your main body pieces or extend past the edge.  Make sure that they don't get pushed up into monster where they won't get sewn into place.

Then sew all the way around the outside with maybe a 1/4" to 1/2" seam allowance.  Leave an opening so that you can turn the project right side out and stuff it.  Decide where you feel most comfortable having your opening before you begin sewing around the outside.

Then turn your new little buddy right side out and stuff the sucker with polyfil.  Hand sew you opening closed, and you are almost done.

I then hand stitched on his cute little mouth.  Now you could have sewed the mouth on with the machine before you sewed the two main body pieces together, but this was the look I was going for.  I wanted to add a little more color.  Then I selected three mismatched buttons for his eyes and sewed them on to complete this charming fellow.  He hasn't gotten a name yet, because the class will make suggestions and vote on their favorite.  I think that is all sweet and nice, but last year they ended up naming the monster Star.  Sure, I think thats a nice name for a cat, but a monster?  Oh well.  I'm curious to see what this years class comes up with.