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| The Headdress |
Well, it's done. I'm going to increase my estimation of its difficulty to "intermediate - challenging" or perhaps "expert" based on how hard it was to piece together.
Then again, it could simply have been because I just really, really, really wanted to get it done and didn't take the time to be very careful when doing the final construction.
One ear is pretty mangled - that's the one I burned. I think I put it on with a slight twist; also, I don't think that I filled them enough. Recommendation on the ears: fill them very full.
Eyes: I went with sew-in plastic eyes. If I could do it again, I'd make the eyes entirely out of felt. It'd safer for smaller children, and these eyes came out of the wolf's head three times after I'd sewn everything up. I ended up sewing them directly to the white felt backing, which isn't as secure as I'd have liked. If they come out again, I'm going to rip them out and embroider on fully felt eyes.
One other thing I did differently: the plaits. Instead of braiding three 12" strands and then sewing them into the bottom of the falls, I ran two 24" strands through the bottom of the falls and then did a four-strand braid (link to T.J. Potter's site, which is how I learned how to do it). It takes more yarn, but I had a lot left over (the falls only took one skein of boucle).
The hardest part was the fact that the head is not a standard stuffed animal head. No, it's sitting on a hat, which is convex inside the wolf's head. I didn't have a form with which to work; instead, I put it on the impatient girl-child and worked as quickly as I could. Recommendation: have a head form to which you can pin this thing when you're doing the final stuffing and construction. I didn't use pins to hold it together -- I tried, but because it was a floppy bunch of cloth, the pins didn't work very well. With a head form, I could have pinned it without too much trouble.
So, I'm thinking that I would like to do another one of these -- a Yinepu (Anubis) head out of black yarn, with Hawai'ian eyelash lei yarn for the insides of the ears (so they're fuzzy), or a Set head out of shades of red. But I won't contemplate it without a head form!