Dyno Plushie

In September I foolishly decided that it was a good idea to start a project with 3 week old baby. I wanted to make a plush toy out of Dyno the rhinoceros beetle character from my senior film. It was for her so I guess the time and added strees was justified and now she has an awesome and meaningful first toy.
This is the sculpture I made of him earlier. It was perfect reference.

I started off by making a paper sculpture out of cardstock and tape in the scale that I wanted. I forgot to take a picture of that, but then I took it apart again to have pieces for a pattern and cut out my fabric. 

 This micro fleece/short minky fabric is really hard to find without those dumb dimple things in in, but I finally found some and the color was pretty perfect too.

Then I stitched together all the little pieces and turned them inside out. The little leg pieces I had to hand stitch because this fuzzy fabric is just too much to handle on little tiny corners.

 I did a bad thing. For the legs I decided to cut up my honors cords. I hope I'm not disgracing tradition or anything, but it was just the perfect thing and since Dyno rode with me during graduation I thought it was appropriate. I tied little knots in the ends and glued the tip to prevent fraying.

Attaching the cords to the leg pieces was also super tedious hand stitching.

I started filling the pieces with fluff and I stitched a piece thick plastic grocery bag into the wing casing pieces so that they make a crinkly noise and then hand stitched everything closed.

The only thing left to do was to hand stitch all the pieces together and do the eyes.

 For the eyes I basically just did a bunch of stitches all in the same area until they piled up and kinda look like sloppy embroidery.

 The wing casings aren't stitched closed on the center back line so they kinda are like pockets where you can put your hand in or whatever.

 I think she likes it. Hopefully it has some little features that will interest her like the crinkly back, fluffy pockets, and the dangly rope legs and give her a good variety of sensory stimulation.