Security blanket

A few weeks ago a friend who works as a school chaplain approached me to commission a costume to wear for her school's book week festivities. The character she wanted to dress up as is the Amygdala (part of the brain) as portrayed in the book Hey Warrior. The book was written to help kids understand how the brain works when they feel anxious.

We decided on a onesie for the costume, using Simplicity 8276. I measured the paper pattern up against my friend and it turned out to be just the right length. And that's all the fitting it required. Easy!

I did need to make one adjustment to the pattern. The Amygdala has a little curl on top of its head so I needed to work out how to add that to the hood. I considered trying to reshape the hood itself and maybe using wire, but then I noticed that the hood came premade with convenient seams for adding ears and horns and the like. To get the shape for the swirl I printed out a photo of the plush Amygdala's head and traced an outline onto some tear-away fabric. I cut two squares from my fabric and sewed around the swirl shape (allowing a little extra space for the stuffing). Then I trimmed the squares back to a small seam allowance. I turned it right side out very carefully, trying to get as far along the thin swirl as I could without pulling apart the seam. Then I stuffed it with wadding.

The eyes and mouth are made of felt, handsewn together with blanket stitch. Blanket stitch is one of those things I never really got my head around so I had to get my mum to show my how to do it (and then show me again, when I started out trying to do it backwards). I'm really happy with how it turned out – it makes a nice subtle eyelash effect

I first looked for fabric for at Spotlight but nothing there was very inspiring. So instead of buying fabric I went to Big W and bought a blanket. One of those incredibly snugly mink ones that seem to be particularly trendy in blue this year. The blanket sewed fine and blended very smoothly with the thinner pink minky I got from Spotlight.

Vacuuming was a necessary step in the cutting out process for this project.

I had been hoping to get a slightly redder pink, and the minky came in exactly the right shade, but unfortunately the range of rib trim was very limited, so I went with the lighter shade to match the available trim. In the first instance I wanted to try bleaching and dying the fabric to colour the paws and feet but after a week of soaking in bleach my test swatch hadn't changed, so I had to give up on that idea.

I bought a plain blue knit to line the hood and to make pockets. To ensure the pockets were well concealed I made the pocket-to-garment seam allowance very thin, then sewed the rest of the side seam with the normal allowance, meaning there's about half a centimetre of pocket that is fur, before the actual pocket fabric starts.

And here it is completed: