The best way to do anything is to NOT know what the heck you’re doing. And stick with it.
One of my friends gave me this bizarre animal face doll mask and challenged me: I can’t wait to see what you do with it!
I Eat People… and I enjoy doing it
I pondered, I mused, I spun in circles, I got a little carsick, and finally I pulled out the box of baby-clothes-cum-doll-clothes just waiting to be shrunken down to Lin-Lin’s size, and pulled out the secret bottom compartment (doesn’t every box need a secret compartment?) wherein I beheld..! Yes! A super secret stash of three types of fun fur.
Just look at that face! It’s the face of childlike evil! It’s the face of a smirky snarky leering creature that knows everything you’ve ever done that you would be embarrassed if the world knew about! If you were to attempt a craft project with this face and FAIL, it will haunt your dreams and your sock drawer for the rest of your life!
But I had some fun fur, so it would all be okay, right?
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT sew. I own a super adorable blue-green sewing machine in a beautiful walnut sewing stand… and I haven’t the faintest idea how to turn it on. It was the first piece of “furniture” I bought when I decided to think about buying a house. I figured: I’m a girl; I’m supposed to have a sewing machine. (This was back in the day when I was still more than mildly brainwashed into believing that some day I might just SNAP grow up and know how to do these things I’m supposed to be doing.) So this… creature… is hand-sewn. Poorly.
Despite the fact that the face is most likely a chipmunk-rabbit-squirrel-thing, I decided to go “cat”. When I was four, I honestly thought I could grow up to become a cat. My sister quickly squashed that dream (I’ve never been the same since).
Now, I said unto myself, if I go “cat”, cats are all about being agile and fluid and graceful, right? So this cat needs to be fully POSEABLE. (What was I thinking???) Now I not only had a sewing project on my hands, but I was going to attempt to give it the ability to do things? Yeah… sometimes I’m a peanut-walnut-pecan, and I really need to stop doing that.
I’m full pose-able… and I own the whole world!
I had a creepy face… I had a weird spotted leopard print fur… I had a cat plan… I had a needle… I had a cheap clothes hanger covered in a rubber coating… I had fiber-fil… and I had a single thing of thread (pink). Mwuhaha, let’s take over the world!
I found a vintage sewing pattern online and I adapted it. The legs, they needed to be longer so the cat could get into more mischief. And it needed feet, oh yes it did! Paws! Paws with claws! (FYI: Do not forget to put the claws into the first paw, take the whole thing apart with a seam ripper, sew it back together, and on the second go-around, AGAIN forget to insert the claws. This is simply pathetic and says much about work stress affecting short-term memory.)
These claws were made for walkin’… and rippin’… and scratchin’… and possibly decapitatin’…
But now comes the problem: when to insert the wire? And can it be done at all? And how are you going to sew on that super-long tail? All these pieces and if you sew the whole thing inside out, you’ll never be able to flip it right-side out later!
Let’s just say that trial and error took on a whole new meaning.
And that was before I ever got to the head. I couldn’t use the original sewing pattern head. I’m not very third dimensional in my thinking. So how do you create a head pattern that you can attach a complete face to? I work in a library so I am no stranger to research, but no matter how much I searched, I could not find any tips, hints, or patterns for creating a doll using a plastic face sans full head. Hmm, hmm, I decided to finish the body and attach the head later.
I cut the hanger, I stuffed the cat, I sewed its seams… and I had a full cat body! Swoon!
Without a head. But the whole point is to use this oogly-googly weirdo face!
I cut out a dozen pages of what I thought might be how you could make a round-backed head… and I could never get the papers to fit together. So I found another doll pattern online and I took the back of the head and added ears. (Cheeeee-eeeaaating! La la la!)
The cat face suddenly demanded that I add hair, so I wrapped some brown yarn in loops to create curly hair and glued it to the head. I glued ribbon around the inside of the face so I could sew it to the head. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Until the ribbon came apart from the face while I was taking apart a seam that showed too much of the fur backing. Well, better for the face to fall off now than later! Talk about creepy…
Option Two: Heat up a pin or needle in a candle and poke a thousand tiny holes into the rim of the face. This was not fun. This was hot. I got soot all over the face. The cat was unhappy and it was threatening to haunt my dreams! Several days and its head was still not attached to its body!
I ended up cutting a swatch of fur to sew directly to the new holes in the face so I could then sew that bit of fur to the rest of the head, thus shutting down the unsightly fur-backing issue I’d been having in the first place.
Then I stuffed the head, did a little “ew that doesn’t look right” as I completed the neck seam (and promised myself the cat would not notice, no matter how much she licked herself), and ta da!
I gots me the weirdest looking cat this side of the Mississippi.
Ta da!
Although then the cat chased down Lin-Lin and attacked her. But I blame Lin-Lin, who was once again dressed in her favorite Mitzi Mozzerella ShowBiz Pizza tribute outfit, complete with mouse ears.
I’se gonna eat you, my pretty, ands yer little ears, too!
night,
dawn
Mine Own Oxymoron 