Scalemates Three.
As before, much of my spare time in the past two weeks has been spent making two more Scalemate plushies so I could give one of them to my little nephew Brandon this weekend as a "Hi, welcome to the world" present. I wanted to make two of them in case I messed up, and also to have a choice of which one to give him because they weren't going to be identical or perfect, but ideally better than the first one I sewed. I wanted them to be fairly bright and cheerful looking, the better to get his attention, so I opted for blue and safety orange so they'd be nice and visible. The second Scalemate was sewn by hand to good effect. The third scalemate is the result of an attempt to make one on my sewing machine, an attempt which I aborted after two botched seams. Sewing machines and heavy fleece don't seem to go together. The pieces of fabric that comprise the head have some weird looking seams on the closeup because the thickness of the fabric meant that there wasn't enough clearance between the bottom of the presser foot and the throat plate and the feed dogs couldn't move the fleece past the needle. After half an hour of fighting and swearing I gave up and sewed the third by hand.
I didn't give them button eyes because Brandon's only two months old and I was concerned that an eye would come off and he'd try to swallow it, so Lyssa has volunteered to embroider eyes on the one I'm going to give him. The one I don't give him will have eyes added later. I also discovered that using a ladder stitch to attach the paws and head results in seams that look messy, but a single running loop stitch works just fine. I went around each seam twice to reinforce it and they look pretty good if I do say so myself.
Here's a link to the gallery.