Introducing Brutus the Bulldog. Brutus is for a gift for a new born who is from a Canterbury Bulldogs mad family. I just had to make baby’s first bulldog. I’m calling this one Brutus after the team’s mascot.
To create Brutus I used Butch by Funky Friends Factory. I will not lie this is the most complicated toy I have ever made. Luckily Pauline has created a great step by step tutorial on how to make this pattern which I followed otherwise I would have really struggled with this pattern. This is not a beginner’s toy. Funky Friend Factory patterns are great but sometimes they can be a little hard to follow, they have more written instructions without step by step photos. If you are a visual person like me you tend to get a bit confused in them as they are very wordy if that makes sense. I had my tablet set up on my craft table and followed each step in the tutorial and it made it fairly easy.
Pattern labels were a must for this project. There are 21 different pieces! Some pieces you only cut one piece of fabric some you cut 4. I pinned all my pieces to my fabric before cutting and had my labels ready to go so as soon as a piece was cut I pinned a label onto it and put it on my ironing board. When I need a particular piece I went to my ironing board and grabbed it easily.
For the eyes I used wool felt scraps that I cut into circles. For the pupils I did French knots before stitching the eyes to the head. I love diving into my wool felt scraps whenever I need small pieces for facial features, you can always find just what you need. One step you could do differently to the instructions order is the facial features. Once you finish piecing the head you could do the hand sewing of the nose, eyes, tongue and teeth. The instructions have you put the head aside and come back later to hand sew these on. I was doing this toy in stages to give myself a break from it at the sewing machine and had I realised about the head I could have worked on it during my downtime from the machine. I did buy all the fabric for him. I went to my local quilt shop and looked for fabric that looked like it had texture but didn’t necessarily look like fur. I’m really happy that I was able find this bubble print fabric and get it in both a darker and lighter shade, it gives the appearance of texture but doesn’t scream out I am a printed fabric.
I worked on this toy over the Easter long weekend and finished him the following weekend. One day I traced out all the pieces, next day I cut all the pieces, next day started sewing him in stages etc. I did a lot of hand tacking on this toy, it took longer but I think I saved myself time as I didn’t have to keep redoing my seams. The only piece I unpicked was his forehead as it was off centre. I will be honest even with all the checking and tacking that I did after I stuffed him I found a tiny hole in his outer leg seam on one leg. Luckily I was able hand stitch it closed and you can’t really see it. Next time I will check even more. The hand tacking was without doubt worth doing. Even though he was such a complicated toy he wasn’t stressful to sew as I wasn’t getting flustered on all the curves and odd shaped seams.
Even though I am not a big Bulldogs supporter now they were my first football team as a kid. All these years on it was very ironic that I ended up making mascots representing the Bulldog and Eels around the same time. We had a family friend who was a big Eel’s supporter and at the age of 2 years old I was going for the Bulldogs just to annoy her. One of my earliest memories is going to her house on Grand Final day when our two teams were playing each other, under my jacket I had the Bulldog motives from the newspaper pinned to my jumper and I took my jacket off and showed her just to stir her up. I still don’t like the Eels but I had to get a photo of these two together.
Cassiy
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