The Teddy Dog

In my first post I showed you some personalised cushions that I'd made; one of them was for a cousin's baby and when my other cousin's daughter saw it she was quite taken with it so I said I'd make one for her and some other little girls in the family, but one of the girls decided that she didn't really want a cushion and would rather have, in her words, a teddy dog. This possibly wasn't the best request for me to be given being as I'm not particularly keen on dogs (controversial I know, but I have my reasons!), and when I was little I was much more of a fan of dolls than of cuddly toys, and on a more practical level I'd never made anything like this before, but I decided I'd give it a go and set about finding a pattern.

There are cute a few tutorials out there for making soft toys/plushies, and I almost decided on this one from Jenny Allsorts, but eventually I found Repeating Patterns on Etsy, and thought that their puppy pattern looked quite cute so that was the one I went with.

I was slightly daunted when I first started looking through the PDF pattern, but I soon realised that it was all very clearly explained and there's a photograph for each step so it's easy to see what you're supposed to be doing. So it was quite easy to go from this....

to this....

to the finished article...

I really would recommend Repeating Patterns if you want to make soft toys, I've never sewn anything like this before and all the little pieces, seams and darts were a little bit tricky at times but the pattern and instructions were so clear that you really couldn't go wrong.

Let's just hope his new owner will be pleased with him!