Right after I finished my senior year of high school, my parents decided to move out of the suburbs and into San Francisco. As I was packing for college, I was also packing up the house I lived in my whole life. Since the apartment is a lot smaller than our old house, most of my belongings had to be put in boxes and sent to a storage locker. This means that when I come home from college, I don’t have anything other than what I brought with me. I have never lived in the apartment for this long, and I have really started to miss having a room full of memories from my childhood, pictures on the wall, and all my belongings. I decided to make a teddy bear because I loved stuffed animals a lot as a child, and I wanted something that reminded me of my childhood to keep in my current room.
I was pretty nervous starting off this project because I didn’t know if a hand-sewn project would turn out well. I had to cut the pieces several times because I kept making them too small. For each piece, I sewed a regular stitch around it, flipped it inside out, stuffed it with torn-up toilet paper, and did an invisible stitch around the circumference. I started with the body, then did the arms, then the head, and finished with the legs. I added the buttons on last. I liked how it looked as a little person, so I decided to not put ears on it.
For the second layer, I made the man a slip-on mermaid tail. When I was around ten, my sister and I started watching a show called H2O, which was about three Australian girls who turned into mermaids. I wanted to be a mermaid so badly that I would swim around in my pool for hours.
I am happy with how my final project turned out. I also enjoyed the process; the hand-sewing was therapeutic and it gave me something to do. It makes me feel more at home when I look at him sitting on on my dresser. I named him Qutip, and he will definitely be coming back to New York with me.
Sketch:
Process:
I decided to make it a little man instead of a teddy bear.
For the second layer I made a mermaid tail for the man.
