Totoro!

My daughter is a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro is a big gray forest troll who befriends two girls and helps them in a time of crisis. It's a lovely little movie and I thought Ally might like to have a totoro of her own.

This Totoro plushie is about a foot tall and made from a super-soft gray felted lambswool sweater. All of his features are also made from recycled felted wool clothes. I did use polyfill stuffing in him as I thought my usual felted wool scraps would be too heavy for a toy.

The main body is machine stitched for durability. After I made the main body I appliqued Totoro's arms and fat tail with a blanket stitch. His arms and tail have additional stuffing (scrap polyfill quilt batting) in them for a dimensional effect.

Totoro's whiskers and claws are done in black embroidery floss. Really, he's constructed  using the same techniques I use with all of my primitive crafts. That Cheshire Cat smile just kept reminding me of my jack o'lantern penny rug. 

In the end, I ended up making what may be the world's first primitive plushie based on a anime character.

Chopping Wool

I'm a little obsessed with using as much of my craft supplies as I possibly can. When I cut felted wool, I always have bits and pieces left over. Generally they collect in a paper bag until I have the time to sort through them.



When I have the time (or when the number of paper bags full of wool scraps gets to be too much), I'll got through one of these bags and set aside the pieces that I think I might be able to use again. The rest get chopped up into small bits to use as stuffing material. I like the weight and firmness that wool bits give my ornaments; polyester fiberfill just doesn't feel right to me. Also, the wool scraps certainly don't cost anything and it's just another form of recycling.

Chopping wool is time consuming and messy. Wool felt may not fray, but it does shed many, many tiny fibers. I prefer to cut my wool felt outside on the deck, where the wind can blow away the lint and tiny scraps, but the weather doesn't always cooperate for this in the winter. If I chop wool inside I try to do it in a container that will catch most of the lint, but there's always some that escapes to form multicolored dust bunnies under the furniture in the living room.

We had a nice day early last week and I was able to process one of my bags of wool scraps out on the back deck. I'm glad I took the time to chop all that wool, too, as my customer in Texas asked me on Friday if I could make another 25 heart ornaments in time for her wedding!

Old Crows

I just put some old crows in my Etsy shop.

Well, no...they're not really crows. I'm not sure what these black and white herringbone tweed birds are, but we'll call them crows anyways.

They're made from an upcycled tweed wool jacket with appliqued wings and glass seed beads eyes. The wings are also upcycled material, a polyester moleskin. I've gotten to where I prefer to use all natural materials in my work, but the moleskin is great for appliques and I'll use it up before throwing it away. And as usual, the birds are stuffed with leftover scraps of felted wool.

Recycled Quilts

I volunteer at one of the local thrift stores on Friday mornings. There are several thrift stores in the area, but the one I really like is the Montgomery County Emergency Assistance Program (or just MCEAP) Thrift Store. We're all volunteers there and no one gets a wage, regardless of how many hours you work there. All profits other than the store's overhead go straight into the funds for MCEAP programs that directly benefit the residents of Montgomery County.

You may ask yourself how you benefit from the services of a food bank, a clothing bank, and emergency financial assistance when you've never used those benefits yourself. Personally, I think we all benefit when our neighbors can maintain their households and restore their self sufficiency after a crisis. If you're local to my area, please visit the MCEAP website for more information about their programs, especially if you'd like to donate items or volunteer with them.

In addition to knowing I'm helping my community, I also enjoy working with the other volunteers at the thrift store. Most of them are active (and I mean very active) retirees, a friendly bunch of folks who like to talk and laugh. Our topics of conversation cover local history, religion, fashion, and who brought in the best dessert that week. It's never boring.

I work in the back room, sorting donations and putting goods out. The store sells gently used clothing, household items, books, toys, and some furniture. I won't deny that sorting bag after bag of someone else's clothes can get monotonous, especially if I have my own laundry waiting to be sorted at home. But the company is fun and you never know what you might find. I've gotten some fantastic clothes and toys for my daughter and I've stockpiled lots of clothes to be repurposed as quilt fodder, all for extremely reasonable prices.

In fact, my latest quilt top is made of squares of linen and linen-blend fabric taken from used clothes. The batting will be a used flannel sheet, and the backing will be a used cotton sheet. The only thing I purchased new for this quilt is the thread, and I have no doubt that sooner or later I'll find some of that at the MCEAP Thrift Store as well.

I've debated seeing how many quilts I could make over a year using just material repurposed from clothing and bedding bought from the MCEAP Thrift Store. I have no doubt that this would be a fun and achievable goal, but 1) I buy clothing to use as material from several thrift stores and no longer remember where each piece came from originally and 2) I'd be pretty cranky about not letting myself buy fabric from a fabric store when the mood hits me or I can't find enough yardage to make a quilt back. Instead I'm going to continue to use as much repurposed clothing as I can and pat myself on the back whenever I do make one of these recycled quilts.