I decided to design a stuffed animal bat for my girlfriend’s Christmas present, and I took lots of photos along the way. Above you can see the templates, two practice pieces, and final result on the bottom right.
My first practice bat. I used two brown tshirts. The two most important lessons I learned from him were to use a thicker needle while sewing the wing lines over batting (snapped one in his shoulder) and to make well sure that the head stitching passes through each ear fully. His were sort of half-attached as a result of my failure to do so. I’ll get into ears more later, conceptually the trickiest bit of this project.
Notice that he has one continuous piece of fabric making up his front, with a peak under his chin which joins two additional face pieces. I thought this would be easiest to sew and provide a little mouth-like seam. I planned to have the front piece slightly wider than the back one, and use the extra material to shape a body bump so he wouldn’t just be flat. However, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what shape the face pieces should be. You can’t see in this photo, but the ‘hairline’ formed by the back piece connecting with the two face pieces (where the ears go) was also sort of strangely shaped.
I decided to change my pattern, and make the front piece from two panels. These two panels could then directly join the back piece at the top of the face. I’d only need three pieces instead of four, and I’d get a cute little widow’s peak hairline as well as the ability to easily shape a belly where the two front panels met. I made this little bat body as a test of the new shapes.
Finally, the real fabrics! I had spent an afternoon visiting local sewing stores hoping to find something soft and fuzzy, but came up empty-handed. Having decided to buy something online, I stopped by the Garment District on my way home for practice fabrics. There’s a sort of subsidiary store inside called Dollar-A-Pound where you can buy used clothing by the pound, and I figured I’d grab some brown tshirts to work with (as seen above). To my surprise, I was also able to find a very nice brown felt scarf and a soft suede-like dress that fit my needs! After a good wash, I had all the fabric I wanted for basically free! Here you can see the two front pieces and some ear shapes.
I surveyed a few friends about feet, and everyone thought they were a must. I included foot shapes in both front and back panels of my practice bat, but the resulting 3D toes were too thin to invert properly. I tested the felt scarf material for strength by cutting a few shapes out and stressing them, and they held strong, so I decided to simply cut foot shapes from a single layer of scarf. I’d let them stick through the bottom seam of the bat’s butt.
Here’s how the feet were attached. I just put them inside the body area and sewed over the ankles.
There’s a little foot in there! Remember that everything is built inside-out so that the seams are neatly hidden inside when the final product is inverted. During construction, the nice sides of the fabrics are all facing inwards.
Second front panel. I had to be careful to keep the first foot from overlapping the new seams here, or its toes would be trapped back up inside the body when inverted.
I then sewed the two front panels together to give a fat little belly shape.
Ears… The ears were surprisingly puzzling. The shapes at least were pretty straight-forward.
Sewn and trimmed. Note the little notches at the top to keep them from bunching when inverted.
I used a pen held between my knees to help push the ears fully right-side-out.
Now the confusing bit. Where to position them? The ear above (from my practice bat) is where I want it to be in the final product, but we’re sewing everything inside-out. In order to end up there, it has to be facing inwards and inverted left-right…
…Like this. I think. The seam and ear will stay connected during inversion, so the straight side of the ear needs to be facing the top of the head if I want it that way in the end. The back of the ear also has to be joined to the back of the bat, which means having it face-up between the two layers.
So both ears together look like this, only between the two pieces of fabric. Of course I ended up partially missing the ears with my stitching, so they weren’t properly attached in the end. I was pretty nervous about them in the final version.
Final ears sewn in place! You can see that they’re fully visible on this side of the seam, so they’ll be fully embedded in the head. Hopefully. The felt piece in the back will form the widow’s peak.
Trimmed! I left a gap in the stitching just after his foot on the right side for the inversion. You can see where I went a bit wrong here with the head, though. I’m still not sure if it’s the fault of my pattern or my sewing, but I was hoping to have a more prominent snout shape. Instead I got a bit of a flat, wide-spread face. I think it might have worked if the back piece were narrower, but that would have required my head stitching to be very non-flat (imagine pulling the middle face seam up and pushing the sides back and inwards a bit). I was having enough trouble keeping the ears in check without trying to sew at a compound angle, so the face panels kind of splayed outwards along the back piece and resulted in a flatter shape than planned.
Little snips at all the sharp corners to encourage smooth inversion. Got a little close to the stitches there!
I actually inverted him and started inserting stuffing, but decided that his face was just too flat and wide. I figured I should do some kind of sink-fold type modification to cut his cheeks a bit thinner. Upon re-inversion I realized that this would amount to a simple stitch across the outer edge of each cheek, slightly clipping the outsides of the ears.
Better! I applied some eyes I got from amazon (Darice brown animal eyes) and embroidered a little mouth and fangs with some embroidery thread before putting any stuffing into his head. I think embroidery is usually done after stuffing to ensure proper placement, but I didn’t want to have to worry about hiding the knots so this seemed like the easiest way to do things. I just started and finished each thread from the inside.
Ta-daa! I stuffed his wings one at a time and sewed in detail lines which also served to hold the batting in place and draw out the points along their bottoms. The final segment of wing seam was ladder-stitched tight by hand.
I made sure when designing the templates that his wings would be the right size for folding over like this. I even considered adding snaps, buttons, or some other fasteners so that he could be secured in this position, but in the end I preferred not to have hard protrusions where possible.
Batty got back. You can see how the back of his head is quite wide here. The ears worked though!
The flatness of his face sort of straightened out his widow’s peak and took away his chin, so he’s got a derpy little underbite. We’ve all got our troubles… luckily his can be passed off as endearing. Merry Christmas!
Within Riesen 