Sprite Stitch Board!

Hello everyone! I'm Little Purple Sewing Machine (I take my handle from my sewing machine, which is half-sized and purple, but the letter-limit of the forum got me, so I had to go with initials here - do feel free to just call me "LPSM", though! ), and this is my first post. I hope I'm posting it in the right place, though, having lurked for a while, it seems that this is indeed the right section for posting about plushes (amongst other things) - and making plushes is what I do!

One of my favourite game series of all time is the Lemmings series, so I designed and made a plush lemming.


The little guy's name is Darwin, so named in order to riff off of the myth about lemmings committing mass suicide and the whole "survival of the fittest" thing. The whites of his eyes still need to be glued down, but the fabric glue that I ordered hasn't arrived yet; However, I feel that he's finished enough to show off, so here he is.


Darwin is ten-and-a-half inches tall, and, unlike most lemmings, has a widow's peak (it's just something that ended up there when I was sketching him out as a character, and I liked it, so it stayed), which was a bit of a pain to recreate in plush form, partly due to the long-pile fur fabric that I used for his hair.

Also, he's an alert-looking little fella, so he doesn't have the dopey-eyed thing going on that so many of his species do.


Darwin was created to be a buddy to Lemming (who's half-an-inch shorter than Darwin, and whose parents weren't very creative with names ), a knitted lemming that my grandmother made for me when I was a kid (you'll notice, no doubt, that he looks very different to the standard type of lemming, which is the case because he was made based on a drawing I did of a perception of the in-game sprites from Lemmings, eschewing the look of the ever-familiar box-art - this resulted in a backstory for him, too). It just felt right to take a snapshot of the two of them together, now that I'm making lemmings myself all these years on.

I'm definitely going to make more of these guys - I'll post them in this thread when I make them, so as not to clog up the forum.

I hope you all like Darwin, and thanks very much for taking the time to view my thread and my work.

Hi LPSM,

Great work - Darwin looks really cool!

Welcome to the forum too!

I love Lemmings! I would make an umbrella for him if he was mine.

Awwwww so cute!!

Thankyou, everybody. And thanks for the warm welcome, too!

@stitchingmama - I'm planning on designing some accessories, but I'm finding that making detachable ones is proving to be a bit fiddly, for some reason. I'll probably attach them to the hands of future ones, instead, given this.

Adorable

Thankyou again for the lovely comments.

I took a few more photographs of Darwin (complete with relevant game backdrops), if anyone's interested. They show a close-up, and side and back views.


Close-up (which looks amusingly like an awkward vacation snapshot).


Side-view.


Back view. I really like how his scalp looks, I must admit - I thought it was pretty neat.

I'm now in the middle of making another lemming. Pictures to follow once he's completed.

I love lemmings, Darwin looks so cool! Especially his expression. You're a very talented plush maker. How long does it usually take you to make one?

Lemming wrote:I love lemmings, Darwin looks so cool! Especially his expression. You're a very talented plush maker.

Thankyou, thankyou very much.

How long does it usually take you to make one?

Well, believe it or not, I've only ever made five or six plushes for myself throughout my life (and a few more as gifts for relatives), so I've never really settled into making one thing for long enough to get a feel for how fast I can make something. Sometimes I take my time to the point that it takes years to complete a highly-perfectionism-afflicted project, but other times I'm faster.

For the lemmings specifically, though, I'd guess that now that the pattern's been perfected, it'd take about two-and-a-half to three hours to make one, from setting up my sewing machine and marking the fabrics, to completion. My recent attempt at timing it went awry, as my sewing machine died on me halfway through! (But it's now been replaced, and I got enough done to make an educated guess at the timing. )

My apologies for the double-post, but after a bit of a delay thanks to the Christmas season, I've finished another lemming.



His name is Thomas, because I liked the name and it stuck. He wears a jacket, just because he happens to wear a jacket. Unlike Darwin, and just like lemmings in general, he doesn't have a widow's peak. This made the hair easier to deal with, but I may change the direction of the fur's pile for future ones (with Darwin and Thomas, it points towards the back of their heads) - I need to experiment with this to see how it looks.

For some reason, he's turned out with what I keep seeing as an ever-so-slight resemblance to Richard Hammond, from the motoring-themed BBC television programme, Top Gear, which was not intentional, but which made me chuckle when I noticed it.

I think the jacket looks cute, but it was horrible to make, and I never want to make another one - there's a good reason that I'm a toy-maker and not a tailor! Luckily, I won't have to, as my next lemmings are set to be "plain" ones, as some relations want some, too.