Love Monsters!

The pattern came together fairly quickly. I only went through two prototypes this time before feeling comfortable enough to cut into the organic fabric. This is the second one I made. (I’m lazy when sewing prototypes and rarely change the thread colors, so he has purple stitches peeking out through his teeth.)

I dyed both hemp/organic cotton fleece and organic cotton velour for this project. Pictured here is the organic cotton velour. It’s incredibly soft but a pain to work with. It’s so slippery that a lot of the pins wiggle their way out while sewing. It’s also difficult to sew over multiple seams with this fabric. My Kenmore Ultra Stitch 6 has sewn through 16 layers of duck canvas before, but this fabric proved to be a challenge for it. Even with a walking foot, my machine had a hard time grabbing all the slippery layers piled on top of each other. I broke a few needles sewing over the arms and pocket. I tell myself “never again” every time I use this fabric, but I inevitably forget that as soon as I feel how soft it is.

Ever since finding ethically made glass eyes, I have wanted to use them on almost everything I have made. Some of my characters  look best with embroidered eyes, but I think the reflective quality of the glass really helps bring the face to life in some cases.  I embroidered the eyes on a few of the love monsters to make them child-safe, but I ended up making most of the monsters as collectibles with glass eyes.

I was going to photograph the process of hand stitching the heart on, but one of my gloves broke while dyeing fabric and left my hand looking like a love monster had been gnawing on it.

The first batch of love monsters all lined up.