craftgrrl | Loonakits! Crazy plush critters

Hello and greetings!

I've been making something really spiffy, and I just had to share it about some. I apologize if some of you see this post five bazillion times, I'm cross-posting it all over kingdom come. Ordinarly I try to avoid that, but I make an exception for something this cute, because it must be shared!

So what is it that's so cute? It's a thing (or rather a whole heap of things!) called a Loonakit. I call them Loonakits because they're definitely loony. The first one I made was downright insane, though some of the later ones are a touch more normal looking.

I make fursuits. I do this for a living, thus I run through a LOT of fur fabric. And I am also a pack-rat, so I can't bear to throw the leftover fur away. What if I need it someday?! So the fur has slowly been piling up, until I have more than a hundred different sorts of fur fabric in boxes and heaps and piles, taking over my room. It was getting downright annoying, and I was trying to think of things to do that would use up fur scraps, but was drawing a total blank. I made ears and tails out of some of the more realistic color, but ears and tails in bright colors just don't sell, so I was tending to accumulate weird crazy fur the fastest.

At the same time, there was the lj meme going around. You've probably seen it. It's a meme where you post it to your lj and then the first five people to comment get some kind of free art from you. I'd had a couple of friends post it, and I wanted to get free art, so being the nice and fair person I am, I had to post it to my lj. So now I've got to give five people art. But I don't draw much, I make fursuits. And I can't give five people fursuits! I thought about giving them ears, but not all of them were people who would wear ears. Then I thought, what if I made something really easy, like... like tribbles! Yeah! Just round balls of fur. That's easy! But then I thought that tribbles, well... they're just round balls of fur, they're actually kind of boring. Oh, but hey! I've got these leftover taxidermy eyes! Tribbles with eyes! And ears! And tails! They'll be so cute!

So I thought up a very simple pattern that would make a mostly round critter. It's just three peices, one for the face, and then two on either side in the back, I can share the exact pattern if anybody is interested. Two triangles to make an ear, two oval-ish shapes to make a stubby tail, and there, we're done! Then trim down the fur in two spots on the face, glue on the taxidermy eyes, and ta-da! The very first one was so psychotic looking that I named it a "Loonakit" because it was a kitten-ish thing, and it was definitely loony.

I gave away those first five, of course, but a lot of my friends who didn't get in on that lj meme have wanted them too, so I've made more! And then I made more after that, just because they're rather fun, so I have half a dozen sitting about right now that are looking for homes. Though as I make a living crafting, they're not free anymore, even to friends. I've been selling them at a fairly decent price, and have put up a web page with custom order options and all that. It's all going very swimmingly, and I'm so thrilled! Thus the massive cross-posting of doom, because the whole world needs to know! *bounces*