pattern | Huaiyu Dong

For the I AM project, I made a wisdom tooth plush toy. Because I am going to extract my wisdom teeth soon and I want to make a wisdom tooth for the tooth fairy. 🙂

We started by doing various sketches and chose one that we liked the most and which we are capable to make.

We drew three views of the design we chose.

Then we made some patterns for the design and tested them and made a muslin prototype.

Then I brought the prototype to the class critique. And I found two problems of prototype during the critique: the legs and arms are not attached properly and I sewed the upper part on the wrong side that the seam allowance was exposed.

I then fixed these problems by testing on muslin and pattern paper, and I also made one more pattern to improve my design.

I made the choice of fabric: a heavy weight white cotton (since I am making a wisdom tooth). I also included a swatch of black fabric to make the eyes and the white thread. I also prepared the list of “I AM” terms on a piece of light weight light weight muslin.

I sew the final “I AM” and stuff it with secret ingredients.

Then I finished the final plush wisdom tooth. It made me smile! This project is very interesting and I learnt a lot from its designing and prototyping process. Thank you Kirk!

Reflection:

Generally I really enjoyed this funky tower project! It help me go through a range of processes including making manilla file prototypes, making patterns, sewing and choosing the right fabric.

I am happy with my manilla file prototypes and patterns, and I also love the animal printed fabric I chose for the final tower.

There are two parts that I found challenging: When I made the funky tower paper prototype, some layers could not go through the hole easily, because the “funky” effect made the top part bigger that the bottom part. I used my finger tips to push the four angles of the layer and forced it to go through. The second challenging thing is that I could not manipulate the sewing machine very well so many of the lines on my muslin tower didn’t line up with my pencil lines. I did the first muslin tower on the Singer industrial machine and the lineup totally didn’t work, so I redid one muslin tower on a home machine. The lineup became a bit better but still not good enough. Therefore, I chose to hand sew the final tower with the selected fabric.

This project taught me to never give up when I got frustrated. It also introduced me of fashion as a step-by-step sequence. I now learnt that a successful fashion piece needed a lot of processes, even when some of them will not be visible in the final piece. I think I need to practice on the sewing machine more in the future and I am looking forward for more fun projects like this!

We started the project by making a two-level tower with manila files.

After practicing the two-level tower, we made another three-level tower.

I transferred the manila file to pattern paper with 0.5 in seam allowance, and cut that pattern out.

I added seam allowance on the bottom here which is wrong. I fixed this problem in the next pattern. This is also a good part for the process: we made our mistakes in the early stage so the effect will be less significant.