Who's It For? A New Design

There’s times when I get a new idea and grab some newspaper and a marker pen and start scribbling – doing quick sketches to see how the idea looks on paper.  I cross out, redraw, over mark on the lines till it looks closest to what I want, then I’ll go find the fabric in my ‘storage’ room (which is now chest high in places with boxes of sorted colors and loose piles of folded polar fleece, fake fur and such) and pull out what I would need to do up ONE of the new design as a test run.  But leave the pattern and fabric there to the side for a day or so.

Inevitably coming back to it with ‘new’ eyes I can see where things did need to be tweaked more and make further adjustments..  Then I have a working pattern.  Mostly.

Sometimes after making the first test piece I have to adjust a width or length or redo a section.  By this point though what I put on paper usually is good to go. UNLESS I’m missing the obvious.

Basically – Who Is It For?

I had this with the current New Idea.  I had found a scale pattern on cotton fabric in the quilting section that was a nice size for a small toy.  Smaller scales would have been even better but the print was ok.  I’d wanted to do a CatFish pattern for a while, and sketched out the tail part first with a straight shape like a carrot (too bland) then a curved shape (but not TOO curved, the scales were all in straight lines) and went with a gentle curve like a shrimp, and if I put on two side fins in felt along the upper edge of the tail it added visual interest.  The same tail ends that I use for my catnip shrimp toys could be used here as well, and in the same way – pinched around the tip end at the bottom and stitched in place.  The top cat part would be two arms/legs with a pointy eared head like I used on the catnip bats. Two very small bead eyes complete the look.

That looked good.  Even with the arms preferably potentially up in a V, or out straight sideways, or angled down.  The OBVIOUS thing that went wrong was the size. I have this creeping gigantism that comes in sometimes.  What I’d drawn was way too big for a cat toy.  Ten inches long from ear tips to tail end was too long.  If I wanted it as a kids toy, it was too short. 

 
OK, go back to the newspaper sketch and size it down.  Five or six inches looked way better.  BUT I know at Bristol people were taking my little squid cat toys and pinning them to their outfits or hat (Thanks Steampunk People) and I was getting extra sales that way.  With that in mind I also sketched out a 4 inch version as a potential for pins.  Checking through my fabric stash I found another scale print in all reds so I now had two different scale prints to use.  I like variety and would have wanted a blue scale print as well but neither Hancocks or JoAnn Fabrics carried anything so at the moment I’ll only have the two types.
 
First up – the Cat Toy version.  Yeah!