Santa's Reindeer and How Squshies Started

I've been really discouraged with animation lately. I barely feel like opening Maya and when I do I can only bring myself to work for maybe an hour before my wrist starts hurting or I get frustrated. It sucks. Months of looking for any type of job, ended in me getting yet another crappy retail sales associate job. A job that made me absolutely miserable. I quit after a month, after only 2 short shifts on the sales floor. I really never want to go back to retail. So career and employment stuff this year has been pretty crap.

What has been going well is making stuff. I've been learning and making a lot of origami for wedding decorations. I've finished more knitting projects this year than any year that I've been knitting. Some how this all got me to thinking how I should try making plushies.

Well I can't sew and I know nothing about making patterns. But Jason does. Off and on for the last few months we have been working on creating plushies and I've been learning to hand sew and use the sewing machine a little. We've been trying to find a way to make a whole bunch of different creatures, yet have them all be similar. For the first one we've been working on a dinosaur. The full dino has gone through quite a few versions but he's still not quite ready. The cuteness that he has on paper hasn't been quite captured in plushie form. He's getting there, but he's still not quite what he should be. A small, flat version of the dino is also in the works, close to finished, but not quite there yet either.

But this long ramble isn't all about things that have me discourage or haven't been working out. While working on dinosaur attempts I thought it might be fun to make reindeer for Christmas. The first attempt was horribly ugly. It was also way different from what we were doing with the dinosaur. So it got scrapped and we started the reindeer over, going back to what we were working with for the original plushies. Success! We made a whole set of smallish reindeer ornaments!

I am really happy with them and think they are super cute. I hope you do too!