Sue Havens is a multimedia artist who paints and sculpts in ceramics. Her work is abstract, chaotic, emotional but obscure. She also teaches art, at the University of South Florida in Tampa. As an appreciator of visual art but not a visual artist myself, when I look at her work I feel restless, crowded--and also like I want to talk to her in depth about mediums. So many of her paintings are done in acrylics but feel to me like their spirit is textile in nature.
Maybe I feel that way because I know that she's a textile artist. I only discovered that she was a Serious Artist when I sat down to write this review of her commercial book for amateur sewists, so of course I think of her as someone who works in textiles. But there's something about her paintings... The rest of this review will be about the book, but seriously, go look at her paintings.
Anyway, Make Your Own Toys. It's the only book Havens has published, which is a shame, because it's great. I decided to make stuffies for my nieces who are both turning one at the end of this summer (born three weeks apart!)--I knitted them both little rabbits when they were born, since it was the Year of the Rabbit, but knitting is acutally quite a lot of work. I figured sewing might be easier, and... maybe it's not, really.
I checked out every book my library system had about sewing stuffed animals, and flipped through all of them to find a pattern that was within my skillset (I'm an advanced beginner sewist, not an expert), that was mostly done on machine, and that looked like something my nieces would appreciate having. I experimented with a few other patterns: a whale that was the easiest thing I could find that still looked like an animal, and a teddy bear that was sort of classic and cute.
I finally settled on the cat in Make Your Own Toys for a few reasons. One, the pattern was complicated enough to look quite sophisticated, but still simple enough for me to follow and accomplish. The pattern pieces were provided in the book, but since it's a library book I didn't cut them out, and since I'm cheap I didn't photocopy them to enlarge them. The shapes were easy enough to enlarge by hand on tissue paper.
Then all I had to do was follow the step-by-step instructions on how to assemble the pieces. Which were well-written and clear, and which I followed without too much difficulty. I ended up making three cats, a test cat out of quilting cotton for a first go, and then two cats out of the two cotton flannel shirts I thrifted.
I'm quite happy with how these cats turned out. Each cat took all the fabric from one large men's flannel--I shredded the fabric for stuffing as well as the skin, and ended up with almost no fabric left over. So it was pretty easy and cheap to make stuffies that are a pleasing heft and firmness, ugly-cute, and also 100% cotton, no plastic anywhere, for babies to chew on. The hardest part was embroidering the faces, which I chose to do instead of using buttons for eyes, because buttons can be a choking hazard for babies/toddlers. So I had to figure out how to freehand embroider cat eyes without any actual embroidered thread. But it worked out! Look:
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