Zelda Progress: Birdie

Yesterday I went to Madrid to buy stuff. What stuff, you say? I decided just a few days ago that I needed something to give my Princess Zelda cosplay a bit of..."zing". She wears such a simple outfit, poses are limited and it just doesn´t look as "worked at" (although it is) as other more detailed cosplays.

So in order to capture that "woah, cute" feeling, I decided to make her bird/giant chicken. Who, having no appropriate name, has been baptized as "Birdie" by myself (yes, I am so incredibly original).

For those of you who still don´t know what Birdie looks like,  here he is (psst, he´s the one with wings):

The thing is, I´ve never ever made any type of plushie. So this was an adventure.....an epic adventure full of a LOT of trial and error. Yes, tons of it. *sigh* I´ll probably be able to make a bird plushie next time within a few hours, maybe half a day. This time, It´s taken me a day (today) and around 4 hours last night. I lost a lot of time giving Birdie a liposuction this morning (he wa too darned fat. and his head kept going down, instead of his tail. Grah). So, let´s see a few steps in the making-of, shall we?






First of all, you have to cut out the shapes you catually want the bird to have...In my case, I wanted him to have a white belly, so I cut out the "sides" in blue and the belly in white.








Then you sew the belly and the blue sections together...remembering to zigzag stitch after the regular stich because fur has an annpying tendency to lose its hair unless you secure it carefully....

Funny step: turn it inside out. You´re supposed to leave a hole so that you can do this on one end....I chose the tail.

Stuff it. No, really. You´re suppsoed to use real stuffing for this kind of thing, I guess, but since I don´t particularly want to pay extra for that.....I just used regular cotton, the one that you sometimes use in cotton balls and stuff? Only it comes in huge packs that  are in a "roll" and you can easily pull it apart.

This is birdie after getting stuffed at approximately 2:30am in the morning. ---->


He was too fat, though, so in the morning I gave him a liposuction and cut some off his belly--which sadly  involved undoing all of the work I did in the wee hours of the night (minus the beak). Also, in an rather stupid move, I mistakenly sewed the belly fur wrong-side-up......but it looks intentional. Yeah, intentional.

After that, I started on the wings. Yes, wings!! Notice that he has two rather nice ones in the picture--ones that mix blue, white and turquoise feathers. Since I couldn´t get my hands on any fur in that particular shade of turquoise (more like in any shade of turquoise....and I had to settle for pink isntead of magenta fur.....but oh well)....I ignored it.

Here are the cut parts.......some of which I had to re-cut because I forgot to flip over the "wing pattern" I had made .....

Wing number one, sewn and pinned (what an annoying bit of work......)

Wing one, finished! i had to wrestle with the sewing machine, but we made it!!

Wing two, finished!! Shhhh, don´t tell anyone that they´re not exactly alike......spot the differences? Definitely don´t want to make more striped wings anytime soon. Oh, and the underside I made solid white, like Birdie´s belly. It felt more natural that way.

This is birdie after sewing his eyes (an amber gem with a circle in black marker) on, as well as his wings. So pretty!!

Initially, I hadn´t planned to give him feet. However, despite sewing weights into his...erm...posterior (XD) he kept on insisting on not standing up. Hence the feet. Yellow cloth, folded into a trapezoid, sewn by hand and filled with rice to dead-weigh. 

This is birdie after I finished making his collar accesory. Golden chain (metal) and foamy circles, spray-painted with leftover gold paint. He has twelve, the same amount as I have on my belt. <3 The circles are superglued onto the chain. I might get them secured more with some extra tape or something just in case.




So, what do you think? Isn´t birdie totally rocking the cuteness factor? I think that my first plushie attempt can definitely be counted as a sucess!! My parents were pretty surprised when they saw it; my Dad actually loved it (I know, I was surprised too). Do you agree? The only thing I really hated was the amount of hand sewing I had to do to get this done: eyes, attaching the wings, beak and feet......definite bleh.

Say bye-bye to everyone, Birdie!!