I’m thrilled that Sew Mama Sew is spending the next six weeks focusing on softie sewing. Many softie makers, myself included, often feel a bit outside of the mainstream sewing community. We prefer sorta weird fabrics like fleece, minky, and faux fur. We get excited about safety eyes and poly pellets. We sew many tiny, three-dimensional things. We like things cute and weird.
But really we belong in the sewing world just as much as anyone else. And for the next six weeks everyone is invited to join us by making a softie!
Kristin and Beth at Sew Mama Sew have put together a contest with some amazing prizes to get everyone motivated, including a beautiful Pfaff sewing machine worth $3,999. The prize packages are really impressive – books, patterns, and supplies galore.
Here are the categories (you can enter one or two):
- This Is My First Stuffed Animal, Soft Toy or Cloth Doll
- I Designed it Myself
- Check Out These Details
- Overall Cute/Scary/Beautiful/Squeezability Factor
I’ll be doing a few posts here bringing together softie resources to share and I wanted to start with dolls. Dolls are perhaps the most classic toy of all and making a handmade doll for a child is an amazing gift.
A soft toy drive is part of this event if you’d like to make a softie for a child in the foster care system as well.
I made a round-up of some free doll patterns to get you started with doll-making:
Josephine Doll, Tooth Fairy Doll, Mimi Kirchner for The Purl Bee doll, Gingermelon Doll, Rag Doll, Peanut Baby, Simple Simon Doll, Silly Girl, Fabric Rag Dolls.
Six Weeks of LOVE for Softies is also a great opportunity to support indie pattern designers. I’ve pulled together a collection of doll patterns you can buy as well. When you buy a pattern you can be sure you’ll get extensive step-by-step instructions as well as the support of the designer and her community if you should need help. Take a look:
Rag Doll 3-in-1, Soft Rag Doll, Sugar Plum Fairy, Pocket Poppet, Emma the Doll, Rosie and Lulu, Brigitte Ballerina, Baby Mine, Miss Tippy Toes.
To enter the contest you’ll need to make a new softie sometime between now and April 5. Pick a pattern, or design your own, and get started. If you post your softie to Instagram, be sure to use the hashtag #6weeksofsofties. You can do it!
Awesome! How do you enter?
Hi Holly,
Here are the rules from Sew Mama Sew:
Rules and Eligibility
Softies must be made and shared between today and April 5. Do not enter something you made before today.
Post high-quality photos of your project on your blog, Instagram or Flickr.
Come back to Sew Mama Sew to enter your softie into one or two categories. (We’ll post the InLinkz widgets on the blog next week.)
Use #6WeeksOfSofties to share your work, find softie inspiration and more throughout the series.
Because the US division of Pfaff is contributing the sewing machine, we can only award the grand prize to a winner in the US or Canada. All other prize packages, however, can be shipped anywhere in the world.
Children and adults are all welcome to enter.
You can submit up to three softies. Each softie can go in 1 or 2 categories.
Softies must be primarily constructed using sewing techniques. Adding crochet, knit, or embroidery details for hands, face, hair, fur, clothing is fine, but the overall object should “read” as a sewn item.
oh cool! I’d love to try this, I just got into making softies in the last few weeks for the most recent spoonflower cut and sew contest and had so much fun designing a stuffed animal (just got the fabric in the mail a few days ago and sewed it up). I’d love to try another one now. Have been really inspired by reading all your posts about designing stuffed animals!
Cute fox, Karin!
I am so excited. I had my fashion design students (high school) make Josephine dolls out of scraps for an end of the year project. Found the pattern on Pinterest I made a few for samples and LOVED doing it. I will post mine on Instagram. Can’t believe I found this just in time! Also, let me know how we can donate these. Anything else I need to do?